Jafar Panahi’s new movie, It Was Simply an Accident, which received the Palme d’Or at Cannes this 12 months, begins in misdirection.
A household are driving within the countryside close to Tehran at evening. We’re trying in on them by the windscreen of their automobile: a person and a pregnant lady in a scarf within the entrance, a fascinating little lady bopping round to pop music within the again, imploring her dad to show the amount up. Immediately the automobile hits one thing. The person stops and will get out to see what it was. An animal is whimpering, a wild canine maybe.
“Thank God we’re protected and sound,” says his spouse. “It was simply an accident. What shall be shall be. God absolutely put it in our manner for a purpose.” The little lady is upset, although. “You killed it,” she says. “God has nothing to do with it.” They set off once more however the automobile has been broken they usually cease exterior a workshop to ask for assist.
To this point, all our sympathies are with the household and we assume it’s their story we’ll be following, in one other of the picaresque automobile journeys which can be such a staple of Iranian cinema. However the movie swerves one other manner. On the workshop, the motive force of the automobile (Ebrahim Azizi) walks round and we discover he has an odd gait – in reality, a squeaky prosthetic leg. And a mechanic within the storage, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), whereas chatting to his mum on his cell, hears this sound and is transfixed by it, turning into distressed and offended. He follows the tow truck to the person’s dwelling. The following day, driving a grubby white van, Vahid ambushes the person, beats him with a shovel, takes him out into the desert, and digs a gap to bury him alive.
For this man, we’re advised, was, some years earlier than, Vahid’s torturer in jail, a sadistic servant of the regime, generally known as Eghbal or Peg Leg. Though at all times blindfolded, Vahid recognises him simply by the sound of his false leg. However the man protests that he’s not Eghbal and his harm is current. Vahid inspects his weeping stump and turns into unsure. Stowing Eghbal, tightly certain, within the toolbox of the van, he units off to ask different former prisoners if they’re positive it’s him and in that case what he ought to do.
So begins a unique journey, largely filmed in and across the van, progressively revealing the extent of the cruelty in jail and the best way it traumatises its many victims. One former prisoner, a peaceful bookshop proprietor, advises Vahid in opposition to taking revenge. “We aren’t killers. We’re not like them. There’s no must dig their graves – they’ve finished it themselves.” One other, although, goes berserk when he says he recognises Eghbal and needs to be restrained from killing him on the spot.
It Was Simply an Accident is the primary function Panahi has made since his launch from Evin jail in February 2023, after serving seven months for protesting on behalf of different Iranian filmmakers. It’s additionally his first since a ban on making films, initially positioned on him in 2010, was lifted. He has stated that his movies have at all times dealt together with his fast surroundings, so it was pure that, having spent “seven months within the very particular context of a jail”, the experiences of prisoners have been certain to discover a manner into his cinema. On 2 December, he obtained a brand new jail sentence, this time of two years.
Nevertheless, this movie is sort of completely different from the quirky metafictions Panahi has made surreptitiously prior to now decade and a half, quasi-documentaries that targeted on the restrictions of life in Iran. It’s a totally worked-out drama, nearly an open risk to the regime, because it anticipates how, if the Islamic Republic have been to fall, there can be each an accounting and a necessity for forgiveness in no matter model of Iran replaces it. Vahid is, you might say, conducting a reality and reconciliation fee of his personal.
That burden doesn’t weigh the movie down till the final act. It’s typically remarkably humorous. Save for Azizi, the actors are half time or beginner – particularly good is Mariam Afshari because the photographer Shiva: her sturdy posture and disdain for the hijab are fairly an announcement in themselves – and the movie has the feel of actuality: a thriller that’s about crime and punishment with a seriousness far past the ludicrous confections served to us by the streamers. Regardless of low budgets and continued monitoring, Panahi has eventually been in a position to make a film on a scale to match such a launch.
The ultimate scene, by which Peg Leg is tied to a tree and luridly illuminated by the van’s lights, is overly theatrical maybe. However It Was Simply an Accident is terrific, nothing lower than cinema as nationwide conscience.
“It Was Simply an Accident” is in cinemas on 5 December
[Further reading: Pillion is the film Fifty Shades failed to be]