If success is the greatest revenge then Jafar Panahi surely drew particular savour from his Palme d’Or win at Cannes for this brilliantly knotty conundrum.
The Iranian director has spent the past decade and a half flouting, in the most imaginative manner, an absurd state prohibition on film-making (though he could find no such inventive way around a period in prison). A fine 2011 project, smuggled out on a memory stick, was famously titled This Is Not a Film.
One solution to restrictions has been, with movies such as Tehran Taxi and 3 Faces, to shoot largely within vehicles. There is a fair bit of that in It Was Just an Accident. There is also, neatly enough, much pondering of the ethics of revenge.
The film begins with an apparently ordinary Iranian man (Ebrahim Azizi) driving through the night with his wife and daughter. After hitting a dog and damaging his car, he pulls into a service station and arranges a repair.
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Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), the mechanic, as he listens to the stranger speak on the phone, comes to a troubling conclusion. The voice is familiar. So is the noise of the man’s prosthetic leg. Is this Eghbal, a torturer who, unseen but constantly heard, tormented Vahid during a period as political prisoner?
That is the key question, though far from the only one, that he and some fellow ex-detainees will chew over throughout a nervy film that never slackens its momentum.
The following day Vahid tails the suspected oppressor, bundles him into the back of a van and drives him into the desert, where he makes a halfhearted effort to bury him alive (though not quite conscious). Then Vahid has second thoughts. Maybe the fellow’s denials were sincere. He dumps him back in the van and drives off in search of confirmation from former prisoners.
That synopsis alone should confirm that, not for the first time, Panahi works humour in with the most grating political satire. At times, indeed, the film embraces the blackest farce – a near-Scooby-Doo team transporting a zombie about in their Mystery Machine – without ever compromising its core seriousness. Elsewhere there are unmistakable allusions to the stark wit of Samuel Beckett.
Shiva (Mariam Afshari), a photographer, who was also blindfolded during detention, recognises the smell of the man but is still not convinced she can identify him beyond reasonable doubt. Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr), her former partner, is all for doing away with the supposed Eghbal here and now.
The absurdity of the enterprise is heightened by Golrokh (Hadis Pakbaten), encountered during photographs for her upcoming marriage, joining the party in flouncy wedding dress.
One wonder of this project is the way it asks all the questions one could reasonably require without giving the impression of a list being checked. A connection with their captive’s family is forged in the most absurd, yet satisfactory, of fashions. The final act invites us to wonder if such acts of revenge may be counterproductive and whether the avenger should even bother asking that question.
As ever, Panahi works with amateur actors to secure a connection with everyday realities. The huge moral dilemmas spin out from the personal concerns of fleshy, believable human beings. No doubt one of those unseen humans is the director himself, who must have chewed over his feelings in the many nights since the authorities first attempted to shut him down.
The film comes to no hard and fast conclusions, but nobody could fairly argue that it ends unsatisfactorily. The closing sequence, sure to endure future homage from impressed film-makers, has already become famous for its chilling ambiguity. One of the year’s very best films.
