Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident is an absurdist anti-caper – a kind of minimalist take on It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World inspired by Iran’s ongoing tragedy.
The authoritarian Islamic Republic’s pre-eminent director and thorn in its side, Panahi was promoting his Palme’ d’Or-winner in New York last Monday when Branch 26 of the Tehran Revolutionary Court sentenced him to a year’s imprisonment for “propagandia activities”. He’ll also be banned from foreign travel for two years and from joining social and political organisations. The Supreme Leader and his judges will surely gnash their teeth should Panahi’s third imprisonment land him the International Feature Film Oscar.
It would be merited not only by the sinuous thriller’s microcosmic depiction of the fallout from the state’s draconian methods of repression, but also for its emotional power and orchestration of the shifts in perspective that follow the arrival of new characters. Twists, shocks, and stabs of gallows humour abound.
The film's economy of means is a feat in its own right. As often before, Panahi filmed guerrilla-style, in secret with a small cast and crew in risky locations. His goal here was to relay the horrific experiences suffered by and described to him by fellow inmates during his two previous incarcerations.
It Was Just an Accident starts noirishly. The windscreen POV of a car threading through a raven-black night beyond city limits shows a bearded middle-aged man (Ebrahim Azizi) at the wheel, his pregnant wife (Afssaneh Najmabadi) beside him, and their young daughter (Deinaz Najafi) in the back seat – the girl’s innocent prattle guaranteeing that hell will break loose. Ominously, the car is damaged when it strikes and kills a wild dog, forcing the driver to head to a local garage.
He is offscreen when the rasp of his prosthetic leg startles a mechanic, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), who believes it is the sound he heard as a blindfolded prisoner tortured by his interrogator, Eghbal, or “Peg Leg”.
Vahid follows the family home and the next morning batters the man and hauls him into his white van, which becomes the narrative’s vehicle, as did Panahi’s self-driven yellow cab in his docudrama Taxi Tehran.
At a remote desert spot – where a leafless Waiting for Godot-ish tree connotes the self-lacerating nihilism of Vahid’s revenge quest – he begins burying the man alive. But the man's protests that he is innocent prompt Vahid to get other torture victims to confirm that he is carrying Eghbal. Broken but conscientious, Vahid later helps the man's little daughter and her pregnant mother.
Speaking to Vahid, one of the torture victims, Salar (Georges Hashemzadeh), says of the persecutors, “There’s no need to dig their graves. They’ve done that for themselves.” But Salar wants no involvement in Vahid's crisis and sends him to Shiva (Mariam Afshari), a tough, defiantly hijab-less photographer.
In the middle of a session with the bride Golrokh (Hadis Pakbaten) and her groom Ali (Majid Panahi), Shiva resentfully agrees to inspect the unconscious man in Vahid’s van. Both women were tortured by Eghbal – Golrokh sexually – while blindfolded like Vahid. Shiva claims to recognize Vahid’s captive by the smell of his sweat, but Golrokh demurs.
When Shiva’s volatile ex-partner Hamid (Mohammad Ali Elyasmehr) is subsequently approached, he touches the scars on the man's leg and says he is Eghbal. None of the “proofs” – sound, smell, touch – are convincing and the issue of the captive’s guilt is never resolved; as a human MacGuffin, he’s there to reveal the degrees of movement on the five travellers' moral compasses, or if they’ve lost them altogether.
As the film becomes a bitter farce, various of the travellers encounter security cops and a hospital nurse who, symptomatic of Iran’s corrupted system, demand bribes. The van’s return to the desert – where Hamid denounces Ali as a politically disengaged rich man’s son and urges the captive’s killing – is a Godot-like repetition that closes a circle of existential futility.
With similar circularity at another location – the sky black again – one of the five, perhaps the least expected, demonstrates that brutality brutalizes (as it does in Ken Loach’s Iraq War conspiracy thriller Route Irish). The film's simple but devastating final shot is charged with regret, but not unhopeful.
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