‘It Was Just an Accident’ Review: Iranian Auteur Jafar Panahi Returns to Cannes With an Artful Tale of Trauma and Revenge

With a prohibition of film and travel of a decades finally raised by the Iranian authorities, the award -winning author Jafar Panahi attends Cannes for the first time since 2003, when his thriller Crimson gold He won the prize a certain respect. And yet, the new film that opens in the competition, It was just an accidentIt is far from being a concession to the ruling regime in Iran. In any case, it is the opposite: a tense and intricately elaborate drama about the traumas suffered by political dissidents and other power opponents, whether renowned directors like him or simply citizens of the regular working class.

Leaving aside the self -reflexive narration that has marked much of his work since he was first arrested in 2010, the last Panahi feature is a 24 -hour direct narrative organized with his usual attention to the realistic details, and backed by an excellent cast as a whole. Subtly drawn like a good thriller, the slow film but surely becomes a strong condemnation of abusive power and its lasting effects.

It has been a while since we saw Panahi make a pure fiction, even if this story of torture, imprisonment and the possibility of revenge feels autobiographical in more than one sense. But compared to This is not a movie, Closed curtain, Taxiand There are no bearsin which the director was forced to interpret the main character because no one was allowed to work with him, this more traditional effort is a setback to previous films such as Offside, The circle or your real -time advance, The White Globe.

Time is certainly the essence in It was just an accidentThat begins, like so many Panahi movies, inside a car. The driver, E ahbbal (Ebrahim Azizi), goes home at night with his wife (Afsaneh Najmabadi) and his daughter (Delmaz Najafi) when he meets a dog, killing the poor puppy and writing his engine. He fixes them to reach a nearby warehouse to get help, at which time the film abruptly changes the views of Vahid (Valid Mobasseri), a worker who sees E ahhbal while heading inside.

Or more like, vahid ear Ephobal, which looks like a minor difference, but will have a great impact on the following story. For gradually disseminated reasons when the tension begins to ride, the worker follows the driver back home, stalking the man until his car is towed to a garage the next morning. At that time, Vahid literally moves underway, driving by Ephbal in a truck, knocking out and kidnapping it. The next thing you know is that Vahid is to dig a hole in which he is preparing to bury E ahhbal alive.

If this sounds like the beginning of a grade B serial killer film, which happens in It was just an accident It is much more realistic when we find out that Vahid believes that E ahhbal, a nickname that means Peg-Leg in Farsi, is the intelligence officer who tortured him in prison many years before, almost ruining his life. Even so, Vahid is still doubtful enough about the identity of Ephbal to communicate with a prisoner to confirm him, who sends him to a former detainee named Shiva (Maryam Afshari) who works as a wedding photographer.

Very soon, Vahid’s truck is loaded with a handful of victims who seek to take revenge on the man who abused them for months, apparently because they did nothing more than express their complaints against the authorities. The capture, which adds another suspense layer to the penultimate scene, is that they are not completely sure that the type packed in the truck is the right person, its only evidence is that it also has an artificial leg. (The sound that alerted Vahid before was the squeak of the prosthesis of Egybal).

Panahi uses this configuration to explore the domain effects of autocratic abuse in several characters that are not known, but are connected by the same persecutor. As the team moves from day to night, like many great Iranian films, it takes place mainly along the way, we can listen to fragments of what everyone was going on.

Next to the leader Vahid, whose kidney was very damaged by numerous poles, there is also a girlfriend (Hadis Pakbaten) that leaves his wedding to chase the man who raped and tortured her; And an angry worker (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr) so because of the blood that he really doesn’t care if his kidnapping is the right guy. «Even dead, they are a scourge about humanity,» he says about all intelligence officers who serve under the regime.

This sounds like dark things and much of It was just an accident They immerse themselves in the multiple Vahid traumas and the others have never managed to overcome. And yet, Panahi also inserts cunning moments of humor in its history, whether it is the absurd form of uniform events after the opening accident, or otherwise the strange situation in which the five strangers are found, which one of them compares with Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Later that night, they intersect with the family of Eighbal, and suddenly the hostages of hostages hurry a pregnant woman to the hospital, after which Vahid goes to a bakery to buy everyone’s dessert.

These moments are not only there to encourage us, but to allow Vahid and their crew to contemplate the morality of what they are doing, ask if to kill Ephbal, if their captive is really Ephbal, it finally has a good purpose. Obviously, this is the way Panahi asking those same questions aloud, as much as a man who suffered months of illegal imprisonment as as an artist who could not make films officially for years, even if he found brilliant ways of avoiding the interdictions. His new film never provides us with a clear answer, which suggests in its disturbingly perfect end that if you bury an evil man like ephl or not, he will always remain by your side.

Like all Panahi movies from The White Globe, Accident He is ingeniously elaborated from the first to the last picture. The director of photography Amin Jafari – who shot the excellent Go to the waywhich was directed by the director’s son, Panah (accredited as an artistic consultant), captures many scenes in individual shots, either in the truck or from a fixed position somewhere in the hills on Tehran. The sequences of the set, of which there are several, feel more theatrical than anything that Panahi has done so far, which allows him to show the talents of his cast in a way he could not do for decades.

It is an aesthetic change welcome from all the films that the director had to film behind closed doors, sometimes with just a small video camera. And yet, in the end, It was just an accident It offers another fascinating case of Panahi by turning the camera on itself.