In his Oscar-nominated thriller, Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi turns a chance encounter between a traumatised former prisoner and his notorious jailer into a riveting reversal of the captor-captive dynamic
“I’m just like you” — these are simple words that people say in a wide range of situations, in order to connect with their fellow human beings. Strangers meeting in a train, classmates chirping on the football field, politicians convincing working men and women that their troubles are acknowledged and understood.
“I’m just like you” is a straightforward, universal signifier of empathy, of plausibly inhabiting another person’s skin and seeing things through their eyes. In the harrowing climax to Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s latest film, It Was Just an Accident, however, “I’m just like you” becomes something far darker; the anguished cry of a condemned prisoner begging for his life, beseeching his captors to spare him.
The masterful thriller, which won 65-year-old Panahi the Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival last year and is nominated for two Academy Awards at the 98th Oscars (Best International Feature Film and Best Original Screenplay), was released on MUBI India on March 6. The narrative follows a mechanic and former political prisoner called Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), who happens to come across his one-legged former jailer Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi) one day when he walks into Vahid’s garage, looking to repair his car.
The sadistic Eghbal, known as ‘Peg-Leg’ owing to the distinctive sound of his wooden leg squeaking along the floor, was notorious for psychological torture. His cruelty towards political prisoners has irreparably damaged dozens of lives, including the traumatised Vahid, whose fiancée died while he was locked up.
In a rush of blood, Vahid knocks Eghbal unconscious and is now faced with a dilemma — does he extract his revenge or does he choose forgiveness? His fellow ex-prisoners, including Shiva (Mariam Afshari), Goli (Hadis Pakbaten) and Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr), arrive to help identify the captive man (who denies being Eghbal). The neat reversal of the captor-captive dynamic makes It Was Just an Accident an absolutely riveting watch.
Not only is the viewer deeply invested in Eghbal and Vahed’s fates, we are also engrossed in the moral arithmetic involving these characters — will Vahed become a stone-cold killer by executing a handcuffed man? Will the cautious, straight-laced Shiva be able to persuade him otherwise? Will Eghbal finally confront all the pain and the suffering he has caused down the years? Is he even capable of doing so, after decades representing a merciless, authoritarian system?
The Panahi method
Towards the beginning of his career, Panahi assisted the late Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami (1940-2016) on the latter’s 1994 film Through the Olive Trees. The two would soon co-write Panahi’s debut feature, The White Balloon (1995). Panahi was certainly influenced by the older filmmaker’s realism, and there are a number of stylistic traits that the two creators share. Both filmmakers favour long, unhurried takes with semi-professional or untrained actors, using realistic lighting and sound design to complete the ‘docu-realism’ effect.
Both have depicted the impact of Iran’s authoritarian regime on the lives of ordinary men and women, often complicating the simplistic nature of the oppressor/oppressed dynamic. Both of them use children as Everyman characters, innocent bystanders to the dramatic events unfolding around them. Both of them use cars and taxis as symbols of mobility and individual freedom. See Kiarostami’s Ten (2002) and Panahi’s Taxi (2015); both ensemble films are narrated via a taxi driver character.
Also read: How Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi keeps reinventing against the state’s repression
However, there are notable differences between the two as well, not to mention a few elements that are all Panahi’s own. Kiarostami often favoured an allegorical or indirect approach to critiquing the Iranian government. Taste of Cherry (1997), for example, is a philosophical drama about a suicidal man driving around, looking for someone to bury his body after he kills himself. It is only in the central character’s existential outlook that we can locate the contours of anti-establishment sentiment.
Panahi, however, is much more direct and confrontational. The Circle (2000) is a rather direct and scathing condemnation of Iran’s misogyny and the denial of equal rights for Iranian women. Shiva, one of the most important supporting characters in It Was Just an Accident, is a fierce critic of Iran’s mandatory hijab laws, and it’s this criticism (we are told) that lands her in prison eventually, at the mercy of bullies like Eghbal.
A still from Jafar Panahi’s The Circle (2000), a scathing condemnation of Iran’s misogyny and the denial of equal rights for Iranian women.
Another aspect of Panahi’s filmography that’s markedly different from Kiarostami’s is his penchant for metafiction — breaking the fourth wall, inserting an alter ego character or simply playing himself. The first flash of this technique was observed in The Mirror (1997), which followed a young girl called Mina (Mina Mohammad Khani) as she returns from school. Midway through the film, Mina looks straight into the camera only to be told, “Mina, don’t look at the camera!”. Eventually, Mina refuses to take further part in the film and returns the crew’s microphone.
Also read: How Iranian cinema has captured its changing society through the decades
During the 2010s, while Panahi was placed under house arrest by the Iranian government, he made four films illegally (shooting without permission): This is Not a Film (2011), Closed Curtain (2013), Taxi (2015) and 3 Faces (2018). Each of these films blurs the lines between cinema and reality, and offers meta-commentary on the role of the filmmaker in society (especially in a censorious, carceral society like Iran).
Censorship becomes narrative form, almost, as Panahi shoots quickly and surreptitiously with a range of cloaking techniques. The culmination of this phase of his career, No Bears (2022) marked perhaps the finest example of Panahi blending meta-fiction with documentary realism — in this film, Panahi plays himself and documents the lives and aspirations of a young Iranian couple on the run, only to bring the wrath of the authorities upon them (even as Panahi himself escapes in time, thereby indicting himself and the audience with ‘survivor’s guilt’).
A Shakespearean flourish
The prologue of It Was Just an Accident shows off yet another aspect of Panahi’s craft — his gift for pulling off Shakespearean foreshadowing with minimum fuss, almost flying under the radar. As Eghbal is driving with his pregnant wife and his daughter in the car, he accidentally hits and kills a dog, much to the little girl’s distress. He tries to console her by saying it was “God’s will” but the girl replies promptly, “You killed the dog, God had nothing to do with it”, refusing to let her father off the hook.
This moment foreshadows everything important about Eghbal as a character. As we discover later in the film, Eghbal used God and the Quran as justification repeatedly for his cruelty against prisoners like Vahid. His guilt over killing the dog is, as we learn, a manifestation of the guilty conscience he never really managed to smother. And just like his daughter judges him, by the end of the film he must subject himself to the judgement of those whose lives he destroyed.
Also read: Why Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof has been sentenced to 8 years in prison
Ebrahim Azizi, who plays Eghbal, is the only professional actor in the film. It made sense, therefore, that the film’s bravura climax largely boils down to a massive, roller-coaster monologue that Panahi entrusts to Azizi, with spectacular results. Within this 13-minute-long scene, Azizi as Eghbal switches between jailer and prisoner, ideologue and sceptic, aggressor and victim, in a monologue that feels like a postmodern interpretation of Hamlet’s ‘to be or not to be’ speech. Panahi had enlisted his political activist friends to help Azizi get inside the head of a prisoner, and that authenticity shines through in every moment of the monologue.
The scene also works at the technical level because it’s a medium-range take of Azizi/Eghbal, who is blindfolded and laid out against a tree trunk — since he cannot see his captors, we can’t either, placing the audience inside his headspace and allowing them to feel only what he feels. An extreme close-up would not have allowed us to feel Eghbal’s distress in the visceral manner we do, and a long-range take would have failed to isolate him visually (essential for his monologue). Remember, Panahi was shooting illegally once again, in the dark, with a skeleton crew who absolutely did not have the time or the safety/security required for reshoots or multiple takes.
By the time I finished watching It Was Just an Accident, I had been through the emotional wringer. The genius of the film is that it maintains an action-thriller pacing while also allowing the characters several moments of lingering silence, doubt and even disbelief. Character growth and plot progression, therefore, happen in parallel, neither being sacrificed for the other.
Panahi has stated that he intends to return to Iran next month, even though the Iranian government says that he will receive a one-year prison sentence upon his return. His impending incarceration will, no doubt, be seen as a victory by the puny minds of the authoritarian regime. As always, they fail to grasp the simple idea that films like It Was Just an Accident propagate —regimes are made up of people, and no human mind, not even Eghbal’s, can be imprisoned in perpetuity.
