Winner of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Jafar Panahi’s gripping It Was Just an Accident may well mark the start of a new chapter in the celebrated Iranian director’s career. Since his 2010 imprisonment and subsequent ban from filmmaking, Panahi has been making meta-cinematic movies starring himself. Shot clandestinely in tight and/or remote spaces far from the prying eyes of the authorities, these films (which include Closed Curtain, Taxi, and the masterpiece No Bears) have demonstrated a playful blurring of documentary and fiction that reflects the slippery nature of truth under Iran’s autocratic religious regime. (For a detailed look at Panahi’s eventful life and career, read my colleague Roxana Hadadi’s excellent new profile of him here.) Although his filmmaking ban was lifted in 2022, Panahi is in no way out of the woods: It Was Just an Accident might be a scripted fictional drama of the kind he made earlier in his career, but it was still shot in secret and edited abroad, and it seems unlikely to play in Iran anytime soon. And Panahi understandably isn’t abandoning his passions of the last decade-plus: He continues to be obsessed with the elusive nature of truth and the crisis of action in a world where nothing seems certain. In that sense, It Was Just an Accident plays like an ideal melding of the filmmaker Panahi was and the filmmaker he’s been forced to become. It’s an endlessly fascinating and extraordinarily powerful work.
Taking place over the course of a full day, the events of the film are set in motion late one night when a man named Rashid (Ebrahim Azizi) and his family are forced to pull over at a roadside garage after their car hits a dog. There, a worker named Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) recognizes the distinctive limping sound made by Rashid’s prosthetic leg and becomes convinced that Rashid is really Eqbal, the sadistic interrogator (nicknamed “Peg Leg”) who tortured him in prison. Still bent over from a chronic kidney ailment caused by his mistreatment, Vahid kidnaps the man and prepares to bury him alive, but after his captive’s protestations, he begins to doubt whether he has the right person. Vahid enlists the aid of a fellow former prisoner, who directs him to another of Eqbal’s victims: Shiva (Mariam Afshari), a photographer who is in the middle of taking wedding photographs of Golrokh (Hadis Pakbaten), another ex-detainee, when she gets Vahid’s call. Shiva in turn ropes in Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr), her ex-lover, who was perhaps more scarred by Eqbal than any of them. And so, this diverse group of traumatized former political prisoners set off on a journey to figure out if the man they have is in fact the fearsome Peg Leg, and if so, what to do with him.
The problem is that none of them actually saw Eqbal’s face, since they were blindfolded when he abused them. Nevertheless, his presence is seared into their memories: Vahid can’t shake the sound of Eqbal’s limp; Hamid was forced to feel the wounds on Eqbal’s legs; Shiva endured mock executions; Golrokh has only recently recovered from her experiences. This is the man who destroyed their lives, their relationships, and those closest to them. (Vahid’s girlfriend, we learn, killed herself while he was in prison.) Simply the possibility of taking some kind of revenge on the man who may or may not have been their torturer suddenly becomes an existential fact each person must confront in his or her own way. Although they’re ostensibly working together, these characters’ memories and desires are atomized by the uncertainty of their situation. Among other things, this is a movie about how alienating the need for collective action can sometimes be.
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One of Panahi’s great strengths has always been his ability to incorporate allegory and metaphor without losing his grasp of character, incident, and emotion. This is also a reason why his pictures resonate beyond borders, despite remaining firmly grounded in Iranian life. You never sense the director struggling to airlift story beats into place in order to make a thematic point. This ragged, mismatched band of men and women, all crowded into Vahid’s tiny van where he’s locked the sedated Rashid/Eqbal in a wooden box, is a cross-section not just of society but of different vengeful impulses. And they all feel real, like fully imagined people. Though he’s the one who initiates this ill-thought plan, Vahid is racked with uncertainty and looks anxiously for confirmation; as the film proceeds, we might suspect that he’s secretly hoping he’s got the wrong person. The largely calm, practical Shiva has tried very hard to move on; she resists the need to jump to conclusions. Hamid is impulsive, violent, downright unhinged; we believe that he’ll take his rage out on anyone at this point. The director expands his vision beyond the mere question of revenge. Everywhere they go, these characters encounter someone asking for a gift, or a bribe — be it security guards at a parking lot, or nurses in a hospital, or just random people on the street. Far from a spiritual society blessed by the truth of God, the desperate world around them appears to have been reduced to nothing but transactions, with everyone out for themselves, which in turn enhances both the characters’ agitation and ours.
As day turns into night, these people’s actions and arguments constitute a debate of sorts about the nature of justice and moving on, but It Was Just an Accident never feels like an abstraction or some symbolic, pathologically ambiguous meditation. It unfolds organically, with urgency and sensitivity and even humor: We’re so caught up in these characters and their ordeal that the film’s ideas sneak up on us. Panahi never loses sight of the visceral nature of this experience, which makes sense since so much of what Eqbal did to these men and women was physical. We can feel Vahid’s stomach pains. We can almost touch the flap of skin where Rashid/Eqbal’s leg used to be. We can smell the sweat in that stuffy van. At one point, the prisoner soils himself, prompting a vomitous reaction. This attention to physical reality contrasts with the uncertainty surrounding these characters, about who this man is and what they will do to him. That quality of doubt finds its startling conclusion in the film’s intense and hellish climax, whose details I won’t reveal here, but which focuses on something almost disturbingly simple: the basic, agonizing acknowledgment of a shared reality, which suddenly feels like a small miracle.
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