Part psychological thriller, part political satire, but entirely human at its core, It Was Just An Accident is the latest film from acclaimed director Jafar Panahi, who has continued to make movies despite decades of conflict with the Iranian dictatorship, which extended to a conviction and prison sentence in absentia just last December. The movie won this year’s Palme d’Or and landed nominations for Best Non-English Language/International Film at the Golden Globes and the Oscars, and, like several of his prior films, was made without the permission of the theocrats in Tehran. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)
It Was Just An Accident begins with a coincidence: a man is driving home at night on an unlit road with his wife and daughter in the car when he hits an animal, probably a dog, and damages the car. He pulls into the first garage he finds, where a mechanic, Vahid, recognizes the man as his torturer from an Iranian prison. He never saw the man’s face, but knows the squeaking sound of the man’s prosthetic leg. He follows them home, returns the next day, knocks the man out, and kidnaps him, nearly killing him before the man pleads that Vahid is mistaken. Vahid then contacts other former prisoners to see if they can confirm that the man is indeed their captor, Eqbal, also known as Peg Leg, leading to a very darkly comic sequence of events that has six people traveling around in a van, arguing about what to do with the guy who might have destroyed all of their lives.
The plot is secondary to the dialogue and the gamut of emotions it reveals; each of the four former prisoners has a different perspective on how to handle maybe-Eqbal, from the volatile Hamid, who just wants to kill the guy, to the more measured Shiva, who is just as angry as the rest of them but seems to understand that his death won’t solve anything. Instead, the story is the canvas on which Panahi can paint his characters, with enough narrative greed to keep up the pace during the stretches where the characters are just driving around and talking.
For most of its running time, It Was Just An Accident is close to perfect, maintaining an ideal level of tension, including the core mystery of whether the guy is actually Peg Leg, while allowing each of the characters to expostulate with the others enough to give the audience a sense of how the government’s persecution of its enemies has infected all of Iranian society. These four survivors are not visibly wounded; the irony is that the only injured person in the van is the suspected torturer, not his victims. Yet they are all scarred from their experiences in prison, where they were thrown after protesting against economic hardships – another coincidence, as the country is currently engulfed in similar protests, with prices rising and the Iranian rial crashing to record lows. How can they simply go about their lives after the trauma they endured, and now with the added knowledge that the man who tortured them, threatened to kill them, may have even raped one of them, is walking around scot-free?
The movie doesn’t quite stick its landing, unfortunately, as another coincidence of sorts, or at least an unrelated event, crops up that forces the motley crew to make some sort of decision, although it does also allow Panahi to further demonstrate the deep humanity of these people and further contrast them to the regime that would imprison or kill them on the slightest pretense. Once that’s resolved, we get to the climax, with its Shakespearean tone and series of monologues, before a brief final scene that recalls the perfection of the earlier parts of the film.
I’ve only seen three of the Best Picture nominees so far, but I’d put this over Train Dreams and behind Sinners and One Battle After Another. It’s unlikely to win for Best International Feature, as two of its competitors, Sentimental Value and The Secret Agent, scored Best Picture nods, but I wonder if it has a slight chance in its other category, Best Original Screenplay, which seems to be a way to honor a film that’s not going to win anything else, at least about half the time in recent years.