Thirty years after he won the Caméra d’Or for the best first film at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival for “The White Balloon,” a new film from Iranian director Jafar Panahi is back on the Croisette. But more to the point, Panahi himself is back in Cannes, where his films have had to screen in his absence while he languished in prison or under house arrest for making what the authorities said was propaganda against the Iranian government.
With “It Was Just an Accident,” which premiered on Tuesday in the main competition, the director is back for the first time since an Iranian court gave him a prison sentence and a 20-year ban on making movies in 2010. Despite an additional prison sentence in 2022, Panahi has been deemed to have served his sentence — and while he still makes movies clandestinely because he could never get the required government approval for the kind of films he wants to make, he’s now free to walk the red carpet in Cannes.
In recent years, the director’s films — “Taxi,” “Closed Curtain,” “No Bears” — have explored a constricted life in Iran; they’ve been richly humanistic works that show a wry sense of humor and blend the lines between fiction and reality, with the director often appearing onscreen as some version of himself.
The bracing thing about “It Was Just an Accident” is that it has married Panahi’s wit and humanism with real anger; if many of his previous films lulled you into realizing his points about oppression and injustice, this one is downright confrontational, from the moment its action begins with a man driving away from a city in the dead of night and accidentally hitting and killing a dog.
That leads to a string of coincidences: The car stalls; a passing motorcyclist offers to lend a hand if they come to the warehouse where he works; the cyclist’s boss hears the squeak of the man’s artificial leg and follows him home; and the next thing you know, the apparently hapless driver has been knocked out, tied up and partially buried in a pit in the desert.
Vahid, the abductor, is sure that the man he’s taken is Eqbal, aka Peg Leg, an interrogator in Iranian prisons during a time when dissidents were imprisoned, tortured and killed. “I’d know the squeak of your artificial leg anywhere,” he shouts as he shovels dirt onto the man.
“I lost my leg in an accident last year, asshole!” the man yells back. “Check my scars!” Vahid rips the man’s pants and checks the stump of his leg, which does appear freshly red. But he’s still convinced that it’s Eqbal, which leads him across town picking up a variety of friends who were also imprisoned and mistreated, and who might be able to confirm the identity. There’s the scholar in a bookstore, who urges restraint and passes Vahid off to a wedding photographer (perhaps the first woman in a Panahi movie not to wear a hijab), who brings along the bride-and-groom to be, and then enlists Hamid, a hothead who can’t immediately identify the prisoner as Eqbal but who insists on killing him anyway.
All of them have nightmares of their time in prison, and all harbor a deep hatred of Eqbal, if that’s who they have. And yet decency keeps surfacing, too; at certain points, each character wants their captive dead, and in other moments they’re inclined toward mercy. When they end up with their prisoner’s wife and daughter and the pregnant wife collapses, their mission of revenge takes a detour to get the wife to a hospital. Eqbal even ends up paying the hospital bill and tipping the attending nurse, part of a running joke that finds him getting stuck with the bill at every stop on their vengeance spree.
The jokes, though, are subtle and pass quickly; Panahi is interested in people, but in this case he’s measuring an oppressive society that has bred and gathered an army of those who hate their oppressors. Moral ambiguity has always been a fertile ground for the director, and sharpening his tone from other, calmer films casts that ambiguity on sharp relief.
The film is still understated, because that’s the filmmaker’s style. But there’s an edge to “It Was Just an Accident,” which could be seen as a spin on Roman Polanski’s “Death and the Maiden,” albeit with more heart. It feels tougher than many of Panahi’s other films, hitting a furious peak at a confrontation while the abducted man is tied to a tree. In a festival full of fury, this is one of the scenes that hits hardest and resonates longest.
As for the chances of Panahi sticking around for the Cannes awards ceremony on Saturday, it’s hard to bet against that possibility. The figure of the director standing on the stage after being banned for so long is simply too irresistible, and the movie is simply too good.
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