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The Ramifications of Repression Are No Accident

I have admired Jafar Panahi from afar via his artistic reputation without having gotten around to seeing one of his movies. A shameful thing I know. Not only is he one of the critical figures of Iranian cinema but he might just be one of the bravest, most badass filmmakers around. His use of cinema as a statement is profound -it has led to many of his movies being banned in his home country. He has been arrested and imprisoned on several occasions -notably a sentence that he served under house arrest he flaunted by making the film This Is Not a Movie -it’s own great act of rebellion. And though the sentence has ended, he has kept up his subversiveness since even at risk of further, perhaps harsher reprimand.
With his latest titled It Was Just an Accident, it has all been justified and vindicated on the world stage -by winning the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. It is yet another movie critical of the Iranian regime, financed by Luxembourg and France and filmed in secret without government permit at any of its locations. And you can understand why given its premise is based on ordinary citizens pursuing revenge for their treatment at the hands of a vicious government agent. It isn’t perhaps quite so raw and confrontational as Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig last year, but it is still pointed and passionate, with a message the government does not want to resonate.
The accident of the title could have a few connotations, but most likely it refers to the inciting incident in which a powerful official hits a dog with his car while driving home at night. The damage to his car forces him to get repairs at a garage where he is recognized -particularly for his artificial leg- by an employee call Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), who believes this is the man who once held and tortured him as a political prisoner. Stalking him from the garage, Vahid ultimately kidnaps him and takes him out to the desert to be buried alive. But the man, nicknamed Eghbal by Vahid, claims innocence and mistaken identity -and not wanting a guilty conscience, Vahid takes his prisoner to various friends in turn who were also once captives to confirm his identity -each of whom has only intentions of violence towards their oppressor.
Panahi's style is known to be quite authentic -almost docudrama at times, and that remains mostly true of how this film is presented, beyond perhaps the behaviours of the characters. The discretion of the shoot is tangible in the nature of the locations where filming happens, but otherwise there isn't much sign that Panahi is crafting the movie guerrilla style. There are several major sequences composed in wide shots with long unbroken takes, through scenes requiring a fair bit of emotional and physical exertion from the actors involved and it is incredibly impressive -more so given the risks to the production. Panahi shoots like he has nothing to worry about, and the film reflects that intonation of confidence as it presents a narrative borne out of righteous indignation towards the institutions that inflict such trauma on civilians that they in turn are inspired to acts of violence themselves.
Every one of the characters we meet has no issues killing the man who tortured them -if indeed their captive is that man- with only this question holding them back. Quietly this is a movie about perpetuated cycles of violence that takes the form of a critique of one particular enactor of violence and the consequences of it. The tormented are driven to be tormentors just by the possibility of Eghbal being their monster. But of course there is a chance he may not be. Panahi consistently refuses to confirm formally, as much as some of his characters insist upon it, if the man is indeed who the victims think he is. A lingering doubt keeps creeping in and foiling decisive action, and it is unclear how much is a moral fibre on the part of the participants to this haphazard blood oath -though specifically Vahid himself- and how much is just a reticence to actually enact the violence they wish to in full certainty of who their prisoner is. The tension here is often darkly comic, but there is a severe undercurrent as well on the gravity of this commitment.
Panahi's cast is stupendous; one of the best, most varied ensembles of the year. Vahid is joined in his vendetta by resolute photographer Shiva (Mariam Afshari), coming from a shoot with a bride Goli (Hadis Pakbaten), and her groom Ali (Majid Panahi), and lastly a working-class labourer Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr). They are a stupendous, odd assortment of characters whose personalities and levels of rage bounce off each other terribly well. And just the visual of a bride and groom involved in all this, in a decrepit car park or in the middle of the desert, is darkly absurd -Ali has no personal connection to Eghbal, he's just there out of his fiancé's pressure. Each actor rises to the occasion, Pakbaten and Panahi making for a great double-act of fixated fury and bewilderment; while Elyasmehr acts out the rambunctious impulsiveness of the harshest proponent of immediate revenge.
The greatest stand-outs though are Mobasseri and Afshari, who go the farthest and darkest ultimately. They both acutely play this eerie contrast between their outward lives and personas and the levels of frightful vindictiveness they are capable of where it concerns their trauma. They are also the most introspective and morally torn of the lot by far. There is a coolness to how Afshari carries herself, forthright and considered -a perfect foil to Mobasseri's balance of rational and irrational; both so natural through this highly unnatural situation.
Panahi never puts it at their feet though, and in fact emphasizing an ethical conundrum does them a great deal of credit compared to the forces that subjugated them. Stories of their tortures, both physical and psychological, come up from time to time, as Panahi not so subtly contextualizes this narrative as the consequence for a regime's sins unchecked. Threats and kidnapping aren't condoned -that is clear by the will of Mobasseri and Afshari- but theirs is an exercise of palpable catharsis. The more innocent people continue to be punished, the more these actions will be inevitable. Panahi understands this, and so does the Iranian regime -that is why they are afraid of this movie. 
Through an elaborate set of circumstances, this gang winds up close to Eghbal's family -there in his place for the delivery of his son, a knife in the wound of the man who supposedly wronged them. You almost feel a sense of glee in how Panahi relates that, leading into the ultimate resolution with Eghbal; a sequence in which Panahi moves close yet keeps the take unbroken through a harrowing affirmation on the pain of Iranians and a rebuke at what everyday people have been driven to under a manufactured culture of violence and paranoia. Its framing offers its audience their own kind of confrontation, relief, and shock at what that relief says about them.
Neither of the women in this film's main cast are depicted wearing hijabs -another act of protest that happens to reflect a reality in Iranian society that its government has failed to fully suppress. It reflects the Iran that Panahi wishes to see. Indeed, as the film traces through Tehran, there is often an ordinary world on display, signs of little avenues of freedom for its denizens. Its illusion is made stark by the ending though -a haunting, lingering shot that reverberates strongly in its silence, further blurring the conviction of those moral qualms. It Was Just an Accident does not merely apply to Iran, its fundamental message is sadly pertinent around the globe, anywhere a government actively abuses or is on the verge of abusing its people. The film's success at Cannes gives Panahi's warning an appropriate wider reach. This is what happens, it says, to a society that must live in fear. Vigilante justice is a matter of when, not if. Do those entities in power want to find themselves in Eghbal's shoes? Their captors may not be so hesitant as his.

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