Jafar Panahi’s film about revenge and responsibility tells of a group of people who think they have found the man who tortured them in prison, but won’t take action until they’re certain about his identity.
A film style that is deceptively simple with a profound effect—this is a rare and wonderful thing. Iranian director Jafar Panahi has a style like that, and never more than his recent film, winner of the Golden Palm at Cannes, called It Was Just an Accident.
The title is from the opening sequence: a man is driving his wife and young daughter home from an event when, on a dark road, he hits a dog, which kills the poor animal (thankfully we don’t see that) while causing some damage to the car. As they drive on, the little girl says to her father accusingly, “You killed a dog!” to which the mother says, “Don’t blame your father. He didn’t mean to do it. It was just an accident.” This clever beginning serves as ironic counterpoint to the rest of the movie.
Later on, the car stalls, and a passing motorcyclist stops to help them with a temporary fix which gets them to a garage. As they’re being served there, the owner of the garage, busy on a phone call, suddenly stops on hearing a sound and then begins to act in a weirdly paranoid fashion. What is up with this guy? I thought. It’s not the last time the question will come up in this ingenious story that presents each link in an ever growing chain of characters in a realistic, straightforward manner. There is no musical score. The style is characteristic of the enlightened Iranian cinema of the last four decades: ordinary people interacting in ways that reveal extraordinary underlying truths. The plot of It Was Just an Accident gradually expands step-by-step until, before you know it, we are in the middle of an incredible situation.
The crux of the story that soon reveals itself is that a man named Vahid, played by Vahid Mobasseri, thinks he recognizes the person who tortured him when he was in prison, an interrogator with an artificial leg whom the prisoners nicknamed Pegleg or The Gimp. This man did permanent damage to Vahid’s health, body, and family. He wants revenge. The problem—and this is a problem that lies at the core of what Panahi is up to here—is that he has doubts, doubts about whether he’s got the right person. Because of these doubts he decides to look up some other people who were tortured by Pegleg, so that they can maybe confirm that he’s the guy.
I guess I’m making the picture sound heavy, which in some ways it really is, but such are Panahi’s instincts about people’s behavior that the film is also casually absurd sometimes, and even has funny moments. The emotional maelstrom is depicted so delicately and with such objectivity, that we’re drawn deep into it as if it were a normal thing.
Panahi has endured years of conflict with the Iranian government over the social and political content of his films, including being imprisoned for awhile. Talking about torture is controversial because Iran’s Shia Muslim government has never admitted to doing torture, and treats any discussion of it as treasonous. But besides this, Panahi is tenderly exploring the collective trauma of a people under theocratic rule.
It Was Just an Accident invites us to question some basic assumptions about how we respond to oppression and suffering. The answers are left up to our conscience.
