Censorship made Jafar Panahi get creative. When the Iranian filmmaker was bestowed with the Palme d’Or, the Cannes Film Festival’s top prize, earlier this year, it felt like a celebration of Panahi’s doggedness during his years spent dodging and sidewinding an oppressive regime. Though “It Was Just an Accident” is Panahi’s first film not made under the explicit threat of legal retribution in years, it is just as incendiary as the work he made in the face of the direct ban on his filmmaking. Shot secretly in Iran and edited in France, far from its locale, his new taut black comedy-turned-thriller-turned-both ends up streamlining a political narrative at face value while pulling at every knotted thread along the way.
Iran’s censorship of the arts, cinema included, didn’t begin with but was heightened by the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which imposed limitations upon filmmakers to uphold the purity of religion in their art, lest they besmirch the regime. Panahi’s filmmaking was born into this era, starting as a documentarian before making his feature debut in 1995 with the Abbas Kiarostami-penned “The White Balloon,” a child’s-eye view of life as persistence in a world that never lets up. Panahi continued making introspective films that carried much more under the surface than he let on, seemingly simple structures that unfurl slowly and reveal greater thematic ambitions.
Panahi’s work grew more and more ambitious over the years, and he garnered widespread acclaim across major global film festivals until 2010. After a drawn out back and forth with Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, Panahi was imprisoned for the third time, now on charges of producing and disseminating anti-regime propaganda and sentenced to six years in prison with a 20-year ban on filmmaking. While the former sentence ultimately turned to a house arrest, the latter edict didn’t work one bit. He shot, edited and distributed a number of films in secret, which would often premiere at festivals like Cannes, though he was always absent due to the ban on his filmmaking which also barred any promotion and travel for promotion. These films were made under duress and in secret, like 2011’s “This is Not a Film,” which, technically and coyly, followed the edict.
To say that Panahi’s subsequent seven-month imprisonment in 2022, following his inquiry into the status of his cinematic peer, the heavily persecuted Mohammad Rasoulof, inspired his newest film would be an understatement. During his 2022 imprisonment, Panahi was blindfolded and interrogated for hours on end. In February 2023, Panahi was released. His conviction was overturned. What to do now?
The slyly simple setup of “It Was Just an Accident” belies a more tangled web of moral turpitude spun across years, before the events of the film even begin. True to his style, Panahi opens on the familiar for an audience to settle into before he throws curveballs. The less known about the plot, the better, so turn away if sensitive. When a father accidentally hits an animal on the way home, the car breaks down and he must pull over to a shop where Vahid, a mechanic, overhears this man and believes him to be Eghbal, his brutal jailer who ruined his life. Soon after, Vahid kidnaps him and intends to kill him until he begins to contemplate if Eghbal is really his jailer and seeks out fellow prisoners to confirm his identity and what the right path is, if there is one.
In pitching a straightforward premise out the gate, Panahi ushers in audiences who may have not latched onto his more formally daring work. This is a plainly gripping thriller’s plot. Yet, there is no lack of daring in this film, whose secret production informs its characters’ paranoia, a film whose rage is unmistakable. It’s the rage of an artist censored from production of his passion and livelihood and of a citizen whose life operates under the microscope of a regime and where this rage, emulated in his characters, is directed drives the film. Moreover, these citizens, each of whom has had their life ruined or derailed by this supposed captor, weigh the toll of a life. This consideration asks of its characters and audience what value there is in giving a perpetrator the grace and mercy that was not afforded to the victim, just as it asks what it means when a victim adopts a perpetrator’s tools.
At the center, Vahid Mobasseri takes on the fictional Vahid’s relentless determination of a man blinded by his own vengeance, and his subsequent conflict over his actions with a grit that never pushes the envelope of believability. Much the same can be said of the whole cast, mostly non-actors save for Ebrahim Azizi as Eghbal, whose minimal presence hangs over the whole film. This ensemble becomes a somewhat hysterical circus car in Vahid’s ominous white van as they deliberate what’s right and wrong and if it even matters in the face of the brutality Eghbal doled out on them. The question still remains: Is it him?
By the time “It Was Just an Accident” becomes a hodgepodge road trip, its theatricality comes to the forefront. When not sneaking shot setups in the city, Panahi opts for stagey blocking and drives home the basics of this tale. In a way, Panahi has crafted a modern-day fable that some could take as a parable, but he never opts for such clear-cut moralizing. Dogged as ever, Panahi’s script never rests for everybody to sit around a campfire and discuss their virtues. Whenever a scene pauses just enough to be considered pregnant, a new element of human error, passion or fire ignites the scene again and everybody starts chasing each other.
Panahi takes stabs, cutting to the center of people’s morality when their lives are dictated by an unfeeling reign, and twists the knife further by doling out no easy answers. Nothing can be certain when those determining the certainties don’t operate under the same reality as those who must live under certainty. He pokes and prods and lets out a scream across these two hours against nationwide oppression, but in the haunting final moments, it’s clear that he doesn’t have an answer. Nobody will. The reality of what the regime has wrought upon its people will haunt the annals of history, but what of its people? What to do now?
“It Was Just an Accident” is now in limited release and opens in select Bay Area theaters Oct. 24 and expands Oct. 31.
