You’d be right to want to exact cold, hard revenge on a person who tortured you and planted nightmare imagery of death and suffering in your mind for life. Yet would you go so far as to murder them for the greater good, as penance not only for your trauma, but for the many others who suffered as a result of this’s person’s horrendous, state-approved questioning methods?
This is the pertinent hypothetical at the forefront of the Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s mind, as he was one of those people who was arrested, placed in custody under spurious charges and made to suffer the gross indignities of physical and psychological torture because he dared to resist the régime. His brilliant new film, It Was Just an Accident, extrapolates and dramatises his wavering, post-incarnation thought patterns as he ponders the true value of mortal revenge against his “patriotic” oppressors.
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It starts, as so many Panahi films do, in a car, with a man driving his heavily pregnant wife and pre-teen daughter through the night. They hit a stray dog and the car stalls in the middle of nowhere, yet they find a kind man working at a small roadside factory who offers them help.
The car’s driver has a prosthetic leg and walks with a distinct squeak, a sound that is heard by and triggers another man loitering on the upstairs floor of the factory named Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri). He enters into a state of frenzied shock and, when the family eventually drives off, he decides to follow them discreetly in his minivan. With the help of some shackles and a shovel, he waits for his moment and then attacks the father on the street for reasons that aren’t initially clear. He bundles him into the van and then, with mad-eyed desperation, comes within a hair’s breadth of burying his prisoner alive.
He firmly believes that the man with the squeaky limp is the feared jailer known as Peg-Leg, whose actions caused lasting damage to Vahid’s body and mind, as well as countless negative knock-on effects in his tattered family life. But at the very last second, he questions whether this is in fact the right man, and his doubt fuels a road trip around a bustling Tehran in search of corroborators who can positively identify this potential monster.
It’s a beautifully written and executed work, one of Panahi’s most formally straightforward yet powerful, gripping and generous. As the clock ticks on and the van fills up with folks from all walks of life who also want their pound of flesh, the messiness of life makes itself felt and the simple task at hand becomes more complex as a broader picture of their captor emerges.
Panahi has always been a philosophical and magnanimous filmmaker when it comes to questions of censorship and “what’s good for the goose…” violence, often proposing creative, peaceable and poetic solutions. In the case of this new film, it’s bracing and a little bit scary to see him shift towards an ambiguous middle ground, suggesting that whimsical diplomacy may no longer be an option in these dark, dark days.