“It Was Just an Accident” starts with a misdirection, and it won’t be the last. For the film’s first eight minutes, we are embedded in the life of Rashad (Ebrahim Azizi), an ordinary Iranian driving through the night with his young daughter and pregnant wife.
Suddenly, the quiet is shattered by a jolt of the car and an upsetting thud. Rashad quickly realizes that, out in the middle of nowhere, he has hit a dog, and now his car is sputtering and stalled. In his desperation, he manages to find a lonely repair shop. But Jafar Panahi’s incisive drama, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, isn’t really about Rashad. Soon, he’ll take a backseat to the film’s actual main characters. Turns out, Rashad is our villain. Well, maybe. Revenge can be a complicated thing.
For the last 15 years, Panahi has probably spent considerable time thinking about the relative merits of retribution. Twice imprisoned by the Iranian government during that period on the laughable grounds that he was conducting “propaganda against the state,” the celebrated 65-year-old writer-director has subsequently made several films in secret, defying a ban he has slyly sidestepped and outright mocked. (The first of those illegal movies, released in 2011 when it was sneaked out of Iran on a USB stick, cheekily bore the title “This Is Not a Film.”) Ever since, his work has grappled with his stifling new reality — he also was forbidden to leave the country for more than a decade — via narratives that deal in paranoia and oppression.
“It Was Just an Accident” tackles these themes as directly as any of his post-imprisonment films, although not initially. When Rashad arrives at that repair shop, the story shifts perspective, introducing us to Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), a mechanic who is startled when he hears a familiar squeak once Rashad starts pacing the floor. Vahid hasn’t set eyes on Rashad, but that distinctive sound triggers traumatic memories: He somehow knows this man. Not long after, Vahid kidnaps him.
Cut to a grave Vahid has dug in the desert that he throws the blindfolded, tied-up and terrified Rashad into. Vahid tells him he knows his name isn’t Rashad. It’s Eghbal — or “Peg Leg,” a nickname in honor of his prosthetic leg that squeaked whenever he moved. This is the government lackey who tortured him years earlier. Vahid may have himself been blindfolded during those grueling interrogations, but he’ll never forget that sound. And now Rashad must die.
Despite his artificial leg, Rashad insists Vahid is mistaken, begging for his life. With his bad back and kidney issues, Vahid seems fundamentally broken — his imprisonment clearly did irreparable harm — and he begins doubting himself. What if he’s captured an innocent man? Knocking Rashad unconscious and stuffing him in a trunk in the back of his van, Vahid quickly drives around town tracking down others who were tortured by Peg Leg. They include Golrokh (Hadis Pakbaten), who’s nearing her wedding day, dressed in her gown for photos; estranged former lovers Shiva (Mariam Afshari) and Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr); and Golrokh’s fiancé Ali (Panahi’s nephew Majid), who was not detained but erroneously believes he knows everything that his bride-to-be endured in prison.
They make for an odd fraternity, unhappy to be reminded of their shared horror. But none of them is fully confident that Rashad is Peg Leg — they never saw his face — although Hamid swears he recognizes his torturer’s foul breath. The others express misgivings about killing someone on a hunch. The volcanic-tempered Hamid wants justice now.
In a movie full of heightened emotions and anxious uncertainty, “It Was Just an Accident” (which is France’s entry for the international film Oscar) glides between genres, too slippery to be nailed down. Panahi dabbles in the road movie, the revenge thriller, even the “getting the band back together” comedy. There’s also a stray reference to “Waiting for Godot” and, just like Beckett’s classic play, Panahi’s film is elemental, its every understated moment fraught with meaning. As he has done frequently, the writer-director works with a mostly nonprofessional cast, which adds to the sense of everyday lives torn apart by a brutal regime.
Panahi has a knack for tethering simple narratives to larger political and social issues. (His entertaining 2006 film “Offside” was built around some determined young women trying to attend a soccer match, which is outlawed to them due to Iran’s gender apartheid.) “It Was Just an Accident” compellingly challenges our surety of what we’re watching as these characters debate what should be done. Could the mild-mannered Rashad really be a torturer? Should Hamid’s righteous fury or Vahid’s rationality carry the day? Eventually, Rashad isn’t just invisible on screen but also immaterial, Panahi turning the kidnapping into something far trickier: a meditation on how a country’s citizens can ever move on from the cruelty that has been meted out by those in power. Killing Rashad won’t stop Iran’s regime, but perhaps it can provide cold comfort.
With its deft use of long takes during scenes of sustained intensity, “It Was Just an Accident” is meticulously composed while exuding an air of spontaneity. Perhaps inevitably, the moral drama is somewhat hemmed in by its central mystery: Either Rashad is Peg Leg or he isn’t. But if “It Was Just an Accident” lacks the conceptual audacity of Panahi’s “This Is Not a Film” or 2022’s “No Bears,” the film’s straightforward narrative proves to be just another feint, disguising the writer-director’s anger and sorrow at his own mistreatment and that of so many Iranians.
Indeed, “It Was Just an Accident” could be seen as Panahi’s attempt to work through his own warring responses to his imprisonment, with different characters giving voice to his conflicted feelings. In due course, audiences will learn the truth about Rashad, leading to a final, ambiguous scene that’s as disturbing as the sound of a car striking a dog. Revenge can be a complicated thing. So can trying to turn the page.
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