James Y. Lee
Humanist and Iranian-neorealist visionary Jafar Panhi’s imprisonment by the Iranian government has been at the center of the international film world’s most prominent moral frustrations—one of its most luminary voices undergoing repeated attempts at censorship because of his sobering, cinematically potent deconstructions of the regime’s workings and how it affects people’s daily lives. But the regime’s attempts to silence him completely have all but largely failed, in large part because Panahi is a filmmaker so unbelievably driven towards the act of artistic creation that house arrests, solitary confinement, and “bans” on his filmmaking have not truly deterred him from working to his fullest capacity.
Within the past decade and a half alone, Panahi’s most recent repertoire—laden with the self-reflexive and cake-smuggled This is Not a Film (2011), the itinerant and diversely curious Taxi (2015), and the border-fraught and metatextual No Bears (2020)—proves his ability, his talent, and his steadfast determination towards the art of cinema, displaying its capability for unbounded civil discussion and its potential as a revolutionary art form. His most recent arrest, caused in 2022 by his attempts to support The Seed of the Sacred Fig director Mohammad Rasolouf and Mostafa Aleahmad after their detainments, ended with his hunger strike leading to his release nearly a year later. Now that Panahi has once again found some kind of freedom, his most recent work—the wildly distressing, potently humane It Was Just an Accident—finds the Iranian master questioning what that freedom even means, and the contrasting ways one might even define such a term.
Panahi’s experience with two prior imprisonments has largely informed the text of what he’s created with It Was Just an Accident—the first of which has to do with the fact that his initial imprisonment was an extended stretch of solitary confinement. One man among the prisoner’s supervisors would routinely question and abuse a blindfolded Panahi for hours at a time, and he would repeatedly imagine who this man was judging from his voice, fantasizing about the kind of life he led outside of serving the regime’s oppressive whims. Panahi’s second imprisonment was a more open experience; one where he was communing with other prisoners who had been in there for around decades, where Panahi learned about their experiences and lives both before and during imprisonment. That synergy—of Panahi’s own solitary repression combined with the experiences of others with lives in prison like his—has led to a film with a striking moral dilemma at its center, a heavy humane challenge that interrogates the value of freedom in a country so flagrantly willing to strip it away from the people who exist in it.
In It Was Just an Accident, the first image we see is that of a usual domestic family, upper-middle-class in appearance; a man in formal wear (Ebrahim Azizi) driving his pregnant wife and young daughter down the road before suddenly hitting a dog on the darkened night streets. The accident in question—whose labeling as such by the mother prompts the film’s title—leads the family’s car to break down not minutes afterwards. And as fate, providence, or God Himself would have it, the family is led to the garage of a man named Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), who offers to help them out… until he hears a rhythmic squeaking noise that instantly freezes him into place.
Years ago, Vahid was once a prisoner of the regime. Like Panahi in real life, his time spent in solitary confinement led to his blindfolded questioning and torture by a man with a prosthetic leg that squeaked every single time he walked; a squeak that has drilled itself into Vahid’s ear and mind ever since. And now, that squeak is back, returning in the form of the man with the broken car, who’s just so happened to turn up in Vahid’s place. Haunted by the potential reemergence of that tormenter, dubbed “Peg Leg,” who injured Vahid so horribly that his habit of grasping at his back and kidney has given him the nickname “Jughead,” Vahid’s obsession grows uncontrollable. In the ensuing days, Vahid relentlessly begins to track down the man and his family—and the second he has the opportunity, in the middle of the street, Vahid incapacitates the man, drags him into his van, takes him out to an open, empty stretch of land, and starts to bury him alive.
But there’s a catch; the man insists, desperately, that he’s not the torturer that Vahid is looking for. He tries to provide evidence. The stump that the prosthetic is covering seems fresh, its scars still red and raw. And the man’s cries for help sow doubt in Vahid’s mind—a doubt that leads him to find a ragtag group of other former prisoners he knew, all of whom were subject to Peg Leg’s violence, to help confirm if the man stashed in a box in Vahid’s van is, in fact, the man who scarred them for life in service of the regime’s authoritarian cruelty. There’s wedding photographer Shiva (Mariam Afshari), as well as the bride she’s photographing, Goli (Hadis Paak Baten), with Goli’s groom, Ali (Majid Panahi) following close behind—not to mention bookseller Salar (George Hashem Zadeh) and the short-fused, vengeance-seeking Hamid (Mohammed Ali Eliyas Mehr).
It Was Just an Accident is not a film that insists on having some kind of a clean solution. It’s a film willing to plumb the depths of anti-authoritarian rage, of people so thoroughly abused by the system that revenge has been a genuine notion that’s crossed their minds, and maintain enough empathy for all involved to understand both where the urge for vengeance comes from, but also the myriad of methods it could be directed. Each of the characters in this incredible cast—the vast majority of whom are portrayed by non-professional actors, an astonishing feat—represent different perspectives of that rage while never losing sight of their individual anchors of humanity. Vahid is plagued by doubt yet wants to adhere to his moral virtues; Shiva attempts to be the voice of reason; Hamid impulsively leaps at any opportunity possible to make good on “an eye for an eye”; Goli and Ali try their hardest to look towards a more idyllic future even as the Sword of Damocles of this deeply sordid affair hangs over what may be the rest of their lives together.
That doesn’t indicate the film is an entirely dour affair, however. Moments of levity emerge from surprising places and sources of genuine discomfort, with shots that hammer in the absurdity of certain moments (a scene where Vahid’s van undergoes a temporary setback leads to one of the funniest overhead shot jump-cuts in recent memory), and scenes that leap out at characters from places so unexpected that the story seems to be just as thrown off-balance as they are. But even the levity informs the tension and vice versa; a sharp tonal balance that keeps the audience engaged and on their feet while ever-constantly heightening the humanity behind the film’s growingly dire emotional frequency.
This is a symbolically and dramaturgically airtight film as well; for one, each character chooses to identify the prosthetic-legged man as their torturer through a different sense outside of their sight. Bribes emerge in various moments to hammer in the degree to which money equates to complicity in a country of ruthless control. The internal and domestic lives of these characters are charted out to an exacting degree where they inform on the film’s central dilemma rather than distracting from it. As a result, Panahi’s film is not just a complete portrait of how different people elect to survive and go on with their lives in an oppressive regime, but also a fully composed world of different movements and interests that show a different mode of imprisonment even in “freedom”—psychological, physical, commercial, and otherwise. No wonder, then, that the film steadily moves away from an ostensible “mystery.” The identity of the man that Vahid’s captured is rarely brought into question in a way that drives the narrative in a more quizzical, puzzle-oriented direction. Panahi’s humanistic lens—helped by the deftly practical perspective of cinematographer Amin Jafari and the keen sense for timing of editor Amir Etminan—is trained to a profoundly curious extent on how life in “freedom” is a repressed life, always teetering on the edge.
And, of course, Panahi knows how to bring all of these elements together with unbelievable proficiency. The film ultimately reaches a final 20-minute stretch of untimely harrowing force—one that rips open the universal tragedy of how humanity is sacrificed both in service of and in opposition to the regime. And as it settles on perhaps the most haunting final shot this side of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019), a suffocatingly long concluding image that annihilates any chance of an over-savory narrative or thematic resolution, Panahi’s focus makes clear that the cost of vengeance is more complex than any aspiration towards catharsis or self-destruction will provide. He also makes clear, in the process, his keen experiential understanding of how film as a medium is designed to peer into these complex human traits, of how its debt to that humanity, which authoritarian regimes will always strive to destroy, is what lends the artform its greatest power. Panahi is one of the alarmingly few filmmakers who illuminates cinema’s revolutionary purpose and potential—It Was Just an Accident is the latest in a long string of films that demonstrate the extent to which he, uniquely among his contemporaries, allows that potential to thrive.
