It Was Just an Accident

Tuesday March 10 @ 7 pm

Crime / Drama / Mystery / Thriller
Rated PG – 1hr 43min

Despite its title, you can’t find a more controlled film than Jafar Panahi‘s Palme d’Or winner It Was Just an Accident. From the opening shot, featuring a husband (Ebrahim Azizi) and his pregnant wife driving at night on a dirt road, we’re fully in the Iranian auteur’s grasp. The couple’s child bounces in the backseat to the pop music blaring from the radio, forming a sweet family drive that’s interrupted by the dad running over a dog. Despite the daughter’s sadness over the canine, her mother is unfazed. She blames it on God and the lack of streetlights, which makes animals common prey on this road. “It was just an accident,” she says. Much like the creatures whose lives are destroyed on this street, by virtue of this misfortune, their lives will be diverted.

It Was Just an Accident is a film about prisons, the ones time and memory make for us, and the hard-to-find psychological keys that’ll release us. Because how do you remain human when your humanity has been stripped? How can you not resort to fighting with the opposition’s worn-out tools? It seems that’s all you have left. These are questions Panahi poses to his characters, who, through a simple read, could all be interpreted as versions of him. By extension, then, these can also be interpreted as questions he’s posed to himself. The director was first imprisoned in 2010 for two months, enduring mistreatment by his captors and hearing about threats against his family. When he was finally released, he was put on house arrest and banned from making movies, a ban he continues to defy to this day.

If success is the greatest revenge then Jafar Panahi surely drew particular savour from his Palme d’Or win at Cannes for this brilliantly knotty conundrum. The Iranian director has spent the past decade and a half flouting, in the most imaginative manner, an absurd state prohibition on film-making (though he could find no such inventive way around a period in prison). A fine 2011 project, smuggled out on a memory stick, was famously titled This Is Not a Film.

The film is surprisingly funny. This colorful collection of characters—a laborer, a bride and groom, a photographer, and a casual guy—all thrown together in a tiny space for their differences to arise and take shape as they work through several amusing obstacles. The van breaks down, a birth happens, bribes are given out, and disagreements lead to winking reveals. While some of the humor arises from the witty script, editor Amir Etminan’s wonderful pans are equally as silly. Consequently, the sense of space in this picture is two-fold. While it can evoke comedy, it can also inspire tension. Because there are several prisons in this film: there’s the van’s wide toolbox they hide the man in, which recalls Hitchcock’s “Rope,” the van itself, and the vast desert they take him to. Panahi’s visual handling of these places culminates in Hamid’s desert rant—a long, unbroken shot that cycles through three compositions by merely panning back and forth—wherein he bristles at each person for being a neutral observer, someone willing to erase the past, or for being generally passive. Each represents the measures individuals take under a repressive regime, not just to survive. But also to remain human.

One wonder of this project is the way it asks all the questions one could reasonably require without giving the impression of a list being checked. A connection with their captive’s family is forged in the most absurd, yet satisfactory, of fashions. The final act invites us to wonder if such acts of revenge may be counterproductive and whether the avenger should even bother asking that question.

It Was Just an Accident is a taut and twisting revenge thriller loaded with heavyweight ethical quandaries. It is heartbreakingly explicit about what the well-drawn characters have suffered, but it asks whether they can ever be justified in using the same methods – abduction, torture – as their oppressors. Even if they can be sure who their captive is, do they have the right to execute him? On the other hand, do they have a choice? Have they gone so far that they will be in more trouble if they release him than if they finish the job?

It’s a film of overwhelmingly visceral emotion; impossible, then, to separate from what we imagine Panahi must feel himself. And yet, so often, we’ll see characters clamber over each other and wheel around their limbs like they’re in a Buster Keaton comedy.