Directed by: Jafar Panahi
Distributed by: Neon
Written by Eric Zhu
60/100
Although he began his career assistant directing for Abbas Kiarostami and even won the Golden Lion for “The Circle,” Jafar Panahi is now best known for his docu-fictions made under a 20-year filmmaking ban. While these films necessarily take a self-reflexive form, often featuring imaginary stagings and meta-cinematic turns, they also advance a lineage of postmodern Iranian filmmaking (see: the relations between “No Bears” or “Taxi” to any number of Kiarostami films) to more explicitly political ends.
In this specific context, Panahi’s Palme D’or winning “It Was Just an Accident,” is notable for how squarely it sticks to conventional filmmaking. In the film, a mechanic, Vahid, kidnaps a man he suspects to be his former prison torturer. Shuttling between Tehran and a remote location in the desert, he assembles a team to debate whether or not to kill the man trapped in the back of their van.
The particulars of Panahi’s script are surprisingly didactic. These are spokespeople espousing readily apparent viewpoints, and it’s somewhat disappointing how insistently Panahi underlines “It Was Just an Accident’s” themes. One character demands revenge at all costs. Another points out that even if this were the torturer, there should be a separation between individuals and the system. The film spends most of its runtime spinning its wheels on a generic, if handsomely crafted, consideration of revenge. This all comes to a head in a genuinely harrowing sequence where the group’s mounting distress erupts in one sustained medium close-up.
While on first glance, this is one of Panahi’s weaker films, there’s still evident thought put into the deployment of theatrical artifice. The film pointedly alternates between urban neorealism (all the more effective for how rare it is in Panahi’s recent films), and the abstracted stage of the desert. Time and time again, “It Was Just an Accident” introduces us to characters re-adjusting to civilian life, only to expose a barely suppressed fury that ruptures their ostensible stability. More than any of the plot machinations, it’s the swift breakdown of civility that’s haunting, as the film is constantly whisked into a theatrical netherworld where characters are free to bare their pain. The reductive nature of the characters could be seen as a product of their trauma, the film’s Beckettian suspension an agonizing fixation that undercuts their personhood. Panahi’s ultimate subversion is using the generality of his narrative to express a fundamental irresolution of a society founded on violent corruption.
“It Was Just an Accident” Trailer
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