Different kind of identify crisis faced in secretly shot film

The latest film from Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi (The White Balloon, Offside, This Is Not a Film) is both morally serious — its political message made even more urgent by the arrest last weekend of the project’s co-screenwriter Mehdi Mahmoudian — and darkly, unexpectedly funny.

Winner of last year’s Palme d’Or at Cannes, Panahi’s film once again underlines the profound, humane and artful work being done by Iranian Third Wave filmmakers, who persist despite bans, censorship and the imprisonment of directors and actors by their country’s repressive regime.

Most of It Was Just an Accident (in Farsi and Azerbaijani, with English subtitles) was shot in secret, without an official government permit, with the footage then smuggled out of Iran and finished in France.

With origins in Panahi’s own prison experiences — he has been convicted for “propaganda activities” against the nation — the story centres on Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), a mild-mannered mechanic. A chance car breakdown leads to Vahid overhearing a man (Ebrahim Azizi) he suspects is a prison torturer.

Vahid, who still suffers chronic pain from the brutality he endured when jailed for taking part in a workers’ protest, kidnaps the man off the street and takes him out to the desert with a plan to bury him alive.

He hesitates, though, held back by uncertainty about the man’s identity — and perhaps by his own decency.

The worry that he might have the wrong man leads Vahid on a crazy drive around Tehran, as he picks up other prison victims, hoping they can provide a conclusive identification. What Vahid gets instead — comically, tragically — is more confusion.

The gang keeps getting into oddball, everyday interactions with their fellow citizens, all while debating difficult issues of memory and trauma, revenge and justice, and the cycle of political violence.

“We aren’t killers,” counsels Vahid’s friend Salar (George Hashemzadeh). “We’re not like them.”

Level-headed Shiva (Mariam Afshari), who works as a wedding photographer, suggests it’s not pity for the torturer that keeps her from advocating killing him. It’s for herself — and what the act would do to her — that she resists violence. She is drawn into arguments with a former lover, hotheaded Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr), clearly broken by his time in jail and ready to kill the man then and there.

Golrokh (Hadis Pakbaten), the bride-to-be Shiva was photographing (who spends the entirety of the film dressed incongruously in a floofy white gown), is ready to dig into the past, no matter how painful, hoping for some kind of finality. Her groom, Ali (Majid Panahi), just wants to forget about it and put this horror behind them.

Shot under tricky circumstances with limited resources, the drama feels natural and direct, even when events become improbable. Like Panahi’s 2015 film Taxi, it also involves lots of footage of people driving around.

There is comedy in the group’s bickering, especially as more and more people get packed into the back of Vahid’s rundown van, in a scene that starts to feel like that famously overcrowded Marx Brothers gag.

In a larger sense, though, the film’s humour is existential. With explicit references to Waiting for Godot, there is a bleak Beckettian hilarity to the characters’ absurdist adventures.

There are, as well, scenes of rage and raw anguish circling around Vahid’s dilemma, which in the end comes down to bumbling, doubting humanity against the fanatic certainty of authoritarian rule. Panahi’s approach to this conflict is fiercely specific to Iran — currently roiled by mass demonstrations and government crackdowns resulting in thousands of arrests and deaths — but it’s also universal enough to apply to other places and times.

It Was Just an Accident ends on an ambiguous note, which to many viewers will seem pitch dark. Against that pessimism, though, is a quietly spoken reminder that even the most tyrannical regime eventually comes to an end.

“We have no need to dig their graves,” Salar says at one point. “They have done it themselves.”

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