Review of the Week: It Was Just an Accident

(103 mins; 12A, in cinemas now)

The Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi has long been beloved in Europe, but it’s this film – his 12th – which finally won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Add that to his Golden Lion (from Venice) for The Circle in 2000, and his Golden Bear (from Berlin) for 2015’s Taxi Tehran, and Panahi now ranks alongside Henri-Georges Clouzot, Michelangelo Antonioni and Robert Altman as one of only four filmmakers – nay, auteurs – to have bagged Europe’s top three festival prizes. 

It Was Just an Accident feels like the right film to do it, too. Not only because it’s a gripping and narratively innovative thriller, shot through with the insistently humanist humour of the Iranian New Wave, but because, like most of Panahi’s films, it was completed under almost impossible circumstances. Panahi is banned from making movies in Iran, has been since 2010, though he has made several films there, illegally and secretly since, including this one. In 2022, he served seven months in prison before a hunger strike and international pressure forced his release. Last week, while he was visiting the US, the Iranian authorities again sentenced the now-65-year-old director, in absentia, to a year in prison and a two-year travel ban for “propaganda activities” against the state, but yesterday he vowed he would return home. 

Panahi’s experiences as an inmate, including being blindfolded and questioned for eight hours at a time, provide the inspiration for this story, which follows Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), a car mechanic who happens upon the man he believes to have once been his jailer and torturer. Vahid says he knows him by the squeak of his prosthetic leg and impulsively stages a kidnap. But the kidnapped man insists he is not the infamous Eghbal (nicknamed “peg leg”), and Vahid wants to be sure before he exacts his revenge. So he proceeds to drive around the city, with this bound-and-gagged maybe-Eghbal loaded in the back of his vehicle, picking up various fellow ex-political prisoners along the way, in the hopes that one of them can help make a positive identification and weigh in, too, on the best route to justice. 

As the conductor of this rag-tag crew, Vahid is a bit like a dark-side Cliff Richard from Summer Holiday (1963). Only swap continental Europe for Tehran, swap the double-decker bus for a beaten-up white panel van, and swap the wholesome singalongs for plenty of pro-democracy political allegory. 

Or, in Iranian cinema terms, the film follows the New Wave’s quest-narrative tradition, in which the completion of a task is alternately aided and thwarted by encounters along the way. This is often a deceptively simple task – like attending a football match, as in Abbas Kiarostami’s The Traveller (1974), or buying a goldfish, in Panahi’s own feature debut, The White Balloon (1995) – but these films provide an illustration of everyday Iranian society, and a reminder that it’s not only filmmakers whose movements are curtailed by the regime.

It should also be said that Cliff Richard would never hit a man over the head with a shovel by the side of the road in broad daylight, which is what Vahid does, thus commencing his road trip/morality play. It’s an act of violence so startling it’s almost slapstick. Almost, but not quite.

Violence is everywhere in Panahi’s films, but usually off-screen or obliquely referenced. Ambient and abstracted. It’s Nargess’s never-explained black eye in The Circle (2000) and the villagers’ warnings about local wildlife in No Bears (2022). Or, in It Was Just an Accident’s enigmatic, transfixing opening sequence, it’s maybe-Eghbal running over a stray dog on a dark country road. His young daughter is upset, accusing her father of wanton killing, but the mother has an alternative, blame-deferring response: “It was only an accident,” she says. “God surely put [the dog] in our path for a reason.”

What kind of moral responsibility do individuals bear for perpetuating violence in an endemically violent society? This is the kind of question asked by Panahi’s new film, and sometimes very directly, as in one Waiting For Godot-referencing desert debate. Sometimes it’s more allegorical, and there’s a lot of the fable in the way each ex-inmate uses a different one of their senses to identify their jailer: one listens, one sniffs, another touches. The marvel is that neither politics nor poetry is allowed to compromise the realism which gives this film its immediacy.

Cinema is sometimes divided into “films about films" – the stylistic innovations of the French New Wave, for instance – and “films about life”, the kitchen sink dramas of Ken Loach or Mike Leigh. In making work which simultaneously comments upon the constraints surrounding its production and transcends these constraints, Panahi does both. That, certainly, is Palme d’Or-worthy.