Going underground: "It Was Just An Accident"

With his latest film, the Palme d'Or-winning It Was Just An Accident, Jafar Panahi finesses some of what was going on in Mohammed Rasoulof's much-admired Iranian drama The Seed of the Sacred Fig, an Oscar nominee at the start of the year. As there, we find Iranian cinema back on the road, its foremost filmmakers (like Panahi) having been sprung from house arrest; once again, all parties find themselves on a potentially lethal collision course with the regime and its representatives. Yet things have intensified in Panahiland: now the director has started mulling what it is to take a life. Accident takes its title from a line heard in its opening minutes, as a family man driving his heavily pregnant wife and young daughter home hits a stray dog in the dark; this freak occurrence leaves the car in need of repairs. Yet the title multiplies in meaning after one of the mechanics at the garage, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), realises this respectable-seeming motorist, who walks with a pronounced limp, may just be the man who tortured him in custody several years before. The squeak of your oppressor's prosthetic limb impacting upon a hard floor is not something you easily forget. The question Panahi poses - both for Vahid and those of us looking on - is what best to do with this information. The question those of us who've followed Panahi's career may start to ponder is how this specific scenario relates to the filmmaker's own situation, as a dissident who's just been sentenced to prison time for continuing to make films in defiance of the authorities. Has Panahi, too, crossed paths with one of those enforcers who've made his life such a challenge in recent times? Is the new film his way of channelling (perhaps neutralising) idle thoughts of bloody vengeance?

It would be something of an understatement, then, to frame Accident as more urgent than the average thriller. One surprise here is how early the two parties collide and how quickly decisive (if non-fatal) action is taken; dramatically, it gives Vahid the rest of the movie to regret what he's done. (And then start to worry that he should have gone further still.) I suspect actual revenge may be something like this: you act with rash certainty and righteous indignation, and are then given cause to rue and repent at leisure. This grabby first-reel activity also affords Panahi greater time to describe what will look to the rest of us like two distinct yet damnably interlinked Irans. There is the surface Iran where life apparently proceeds as normal, a country populated by model citizens, obediently engaged in the everyday business of repairs, bookselling, wedding photography, raising a family. The other is more subterranean: a quasi-underground network of comrades and contacts, those who've been touched and traumatised by the cruelties of the State and thus have crucial intel to share. What we observe over these 100 minutes is the ever-nervy interplay between these two Irans: the one desperately trying to get all the information they need from the other without blowing their cover. (As a groom is overheard saying to his bride at one point: "This is a quagmire, darling. The further you go, the deeper you sink.") These are, too, the two Irans Panahi himself has been forced to navigate between over the past couple of decades, attempting to film and show the realities of his country without leaving himself exposed to further retribution. How do you make movies you want to make in a place that doesn't want you to make movies? The answer: with a great deal of help from your friends.

Another of Accident's surprises is how many people this narrative eventually involves (and touches, and traumatises). The set-up - one man pursuing another - seems to invite stark, minimalist handling, yet Panahi's film gradually opens out into what's effectively an Altmanesque ensemble piece, a portrait of a troubled society. Through some of the good Samaritans and fellow travellers Vahid picks up en route, the writing can strike a more peaceable note, insisting it probably isn't the noblest idea to go around rounding up your political opponents. But the expansion in personnel also underlines just how many people in Iran have been affected by state-sanctioned oppression: there are, in short, more sometime torturers, and consequently more torture victims, walking among these people than we might first think. It was only around the film's midpoint that I realised why long stretches were unfolding in the back of Vahid's transit van: the aim, presumably, was to keep this production off the street and away from prying eyes. Once again in a Panahi film, the form reflects (and critiques) the situation. Accident doesn't quite sustain the electrifying immediacy of an autofiction like 2022's No Bears: this is more obviously a story that's been composed, right down to an absurdist riff about bankcards, though that authorial distance may be the difference between life and death in Iran. (Presumably Panahi could claim it's the characters in this instance who are contemplating doing away with a representative of the State, not the filmmaker himself - though I fear an authority as ideologically absolutist as the Iranian court would see this as splitting hairs.) It's still an event, though: a thriller rooted in pressing here-and-now concerns (liberal complacency; the best response to zealotry), forcing characters and audience alike to make moral choices, and a rare film where the stakes appear as elevated for those behind the camera as they are for those before it. Form can offer only partial protection, only so much sanctuary; for much of its duration, It Was Just An Accident really just is.

It Was Just An Accident is now playing in selected cinemas.