You’d be right to want to exact cold revenge on a person who tortured you and planted nightmare imagery of death and suffering in your mind for life. Yet would you go so far as to murder them for the greater good, as penance for not only your own trauma, but for the many others who suffered as a result of their state-approved methods?
This is a question at the forefront of Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s mind, as he was one of those people who was arrested, placed in custody under spurious charges and made to suffer the gross indignities of physical and psychological torture because he dared to resist the régime. His brilliant new film, It Was Just an Accident, extrapolates and dramatises his wavering, post-incarnation thought patterns as he ponders the true value or mortal revenge against his patriotic oppressors.
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It starts, as so many Panahi films do, in a car, with a man driving his heavily pregnant wife and pre-teen daughter through the night. They hit a stray dog and the car stalls in the middle of nowhere, yet they find a kind man who offers them assistance in a small factory.
The car’s driver has a prosthetic leg and walks with a distinct squeak, which is heard by and triggers another man on the upstairs floor named Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri). He enters into a state of frenzied shock and, when the family eventually drives off, he decides to follow them discretely in his minivan. With the help of some shackles and a shovel, he waits for his moment and then attacks the man on the street for reasons that aren’t initially clear. He bundles him in the van, and then with mad-eyed desperation he comes within a hair’s breadth of burying his prisoner alive.
He firmly believes that the man with the squeaky limp is the feared jailer known as “Peg-Leg” whose actions caused lasting damage to Vahid’s body and mind, as well as countless negative knock-on effects in his family life. But at the very last second, he questions whether this is in fact the right man, and his doubt fuels a road-trip around a bustling Tehran in search of corroborators who can positively identify this potential monster.
It’s a beautifully-written and executed work, one of Panahi’s most formally straightforward yet powerful, gripping and generous. As the clock ticks on and the van fills up with folks from all walks of life who also want their pound of flesh, the messiness of life makes itself felt and the simple task at hand becomes more complex as a broader picture of their captor emerges.
Panahi has always been a philosophical and magnanimous filmmaker when it comes to questions of censorship and violence, often proposing creative and peaceable solutions to problems that could easily be dealt with through violence. In the case of this new film, it’s bracing and a little bit scary to see him shift towards an ambiguous middle ground, where whimsical diplomacy may no longer be an option.
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