It Was Just An Accident Is A Darkly Comic Masterwork
The Cannes Palme D’or winner is one of the best movies of the year.
“It was just an accident.”
That’s the half-hearted explanation that Rashid (Ebrahim Azizi) and his wife give to their weeping daughter after Rashid’s car appears to fatally hit a dog as they’re driving home late at night. Their daughter is still weeping when Rashid pulls into a nearby garage to fix his car’s damaged engine. One mechanic quickly fixes the problem, but the other, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), appears visibly shaken when he hears the squeaking of Rashid’s prosthetic leg against the garage floor. He hides, only peering out to stare at Rashid as he pulls away from the garage.
And that’s how a simple accident sends the two men on a crash course with each other that sends ripples throughout their lives and the world of their loved ones.
It Was Just An Accident is Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s first film since being released from prison, and his first “official” film since the 20-year ban on filmmaking that was imposed on him by Iranian authorities was lifted early. Of course, that didn’t stop the filmmaker from defying the authorities on numerous occasions since his arrest in 2010, making no less than four feature films “illegally” (with one, his bold documentary “This Is Not A Film,” famously getting smuggled out of Iran hidden in a cake). But even with Panahi throwing off the shackles of the ban — which forced him to get creative by making meta-fictional docudramas — that doesn’t mean that It Was Just An Accident isn’t just as sneakily subversive as his other recent works. In fact, with its twisty tale of former political prisoners taking revenge on their supposed torturer, it feels just as pointed and searing as any of Panahi’s other acts of rebellion.
After the fated accident that kicks off the film, It Was Just An Accident reveals itself to be a revenge thriller, though not a straightforward one by any means. When Vahid sees Rashid that night, he instantly recognizes the gait of “Eghbal the Peg Leg,” the man who tortured him while he was a political prisoner. Following him the next day, Vahid is seized by a terrible impulse: he knocks Rashid out and kidnaps him, taking him to the middle of the desert to bury him alive as vengeance for the pain he inflicted on him. But when Rashid pleads that he’s got the wrong man, Vahid is beset by doubt — after all, he was blindfolded the entire time and never actually saw his torturer’s face. So he collects a group of other former prisoners who also encountered Eghbal — which includes Shiva (Mariam Afshari), a photographer; Golrokh (Hadis Pakbaten), a bride-to-be; Golrokh’s groom, Ali (Majid Panahi); and Hamid (Majid Panahi), a hotheaded wild card — in hopes that they can help identify him.
Vahid kicks off the series of events of It Was Just An Accident after he kidnaps his supposed torturer.
The first thing to know about It Was Just An Accident is that it’s much funnier and wry than its premise would have you think; its dark tale of revenge giving way to a somewhat absurd tragicomedy of errors. At one point, a character name-drops Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in a moment of exasperation about their ordeal, but it’s a comparison that is all too fitting. The characters end up on a twisty, unexpected journey that takes them from a wedding photography session to a hospital, to a random rooftop parking where they’re forced to bribe the bemused security guards. The film’s tone whiplashes between sociopolitical farce to oddball road trip movie, and Panahi steers it with the precision of the most masterful filmmakers. But under all of its comical turns, Panahi’s own searing criticism of the Iranian regime that imprisoned him cuts through.
Panahi has said that his own personal experiences didn’t specifically inspire It Was Just An Accident, though it’s not hard to draw a line between the film and his experience of being interrogated for eight hours while blindfolded. It’s this bitter, righteous rage that drives the pitch-black momentum of It Was Just An Accident, but a disarmingly earnest third-act turn reveals the undercurrent of empathy and mercy that makes Panahi such a powerful filmmaker.
Through this series of tonal rug pulls, Panahi crafts one of the most prescient and timely films of the year. Its gutting ending is one for the ages, and is the perfect capper for a film that is both an entertaining “revenge” thriller and a filmmaker’s inarguably political statement.
