The gift Iranian writer-director Jafar Panahi has given to us all is no accident. Palme d’Or winner It Was Just an Accident uses a very simple scenario to ask unanswerable questions about what makes a person good. It does this by offering four people a chance many dream of: the opportunity to torture the person who tortured you. But can you be sure you have the right person, and if you do, is revenge really the best justice? It Was Just an Accident is a worthy winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s biggest prize and one of the most important movies in recent memory.
A car belonging to a sweet and loving family breaks down outside the garage belonging to Vahir (Vahir Mobasseri), who realises to his horror that the father (Ebhrahim Azizi) has a prosthetic leg. He recognises the sound of his limp as exactly like the one of the torturer who did unspeakable things to him in prison. But in prison Vahir was kept blindfolded, meaning he cannot be certain that it is him. To find that certainty, four other people become involved: photographer Shiva (Mariam Afshari), her former partner Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr), and the couple Shiva is photographing the day before their wedding, Goli (Hadis Pakbaten), who remains deeply traumatised by her time in prison, and her finance Ali (Madjid Panahi). As they circle their city in Iran the group discusses how on earth they can possibly figure out the truth. Because if the man with the false leg is the one who did all those horrible things to them, no hell is hot enough. But Vahir knows saw with his own eyes the man with the false leg is father to a little daughter and husband to a heavily pregnant wife. And when innocents are involved, nothing is ever really simple.
In this depiction, Iran is the kind of country where police officers carry card machines to make it easier for passersby to pay them bribes, and gas station attendants cheerfully suggest their customers add an extra zero as a tip. The necessity of paying up front for everything, up to and including being admitted to hospital, passes without comment, and it’s clear how difficult it can be to trust anyone in a society so cheerfully and upfront corrupt. This little gang, who only know Vahir through the word of another former prisoner, have a hard-fought rapport that belongs to only those who have walked through a fire together – although no one would ever wish to make friends in their circumstances. Just as Goli goes through the day’s adventures in her wedding dress, there’s a new and unexpected level of hope here too. Ali stands by his bride even as she declares she will call off the wedding if necessary to get justice done. But if the man with the false leg was not their torturer, then the justice being sought needs to be a different kind.
Director Jafar Panahi, who was able to accept his Palme d’Or in person after years of being denied the right to travel outside Iran, still has his films banned at home and must work in secret to evade the censors who control official Iranian cinema. He also has first-hand knowledge of what Iranian prisons are like, but has turned his dark knowledge to shine a big light on the difference between justice and revenge. The most horrible part is how utterly, globally familiar this prisoner’s dilemma suddenly seems. Fascism is on the rise all across the west, and there are plenty of good people in formerly democratic nations who are suddenly facing mistreatment, torture and worse just because other people can make that happen. For centuries Americans especially have been able to watch movies like It Was Just an Accident with the smug knowledge that no horrors precisely like this were happening at home. Those days are over now.
The focus on sound and using a sound cue to recognise an evildoer has echoes in cinema all the way back to Fritz Lang’s M, when a whistling child killer was put on trial by the underworld of his German city. The profound bravery of the actors, most especially Mr. Mobasseri, Mr. Azizi and Ms. Afshari, makes a genuine sense of pain echo throughout the cinema, one which had the entire audience around me in tears of sympathy, and empathy. Right now it’s impossible to tell if we are crying for them or for ourselves. Regardless, It Was Just an Accident stands as a beacon for how modern cinema can grapple with the horrors of the moment.
It Was Just An Accident recently screened at the Cannes Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the Cannes site for the title.
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