Thirty years after winning the Golden Camera for the best first film of the 1995 Cannes Film Festival for “The White Balloon”, a new film by Iranian director Jafar Panahi is back on the Croisette. But more specifically, Panahi himself is back in Cannes, where his films had to project in his absence when he languished in prison or under house arrest for having done what the authorities said that it was propaganda against the Iranian government.
With “It was only an accident”, which was presented Tuesday in the main competition, the director is back for the first time since a Iranian court granted him a prison sentence and a ban of 20 years of films in 2010. Despite an additional prison sentence in 2022, Panahi was considered to have served his sentence – and although he always made films that he wanted to make the government For the government so that the government is obliged to make a boost so that the government is compulsory to make a boost so that the government is forced to make a boost so that the government is compulsory so that it is for a boost so that it is for a boost so that the government is compulsory so that the government is compulsory to make a boost so that the government is compulsory for it to be rejected for the government.
In recent years, the director’s films – “Taxi”, “Closed Curtain”, “No Bears” – have explored a limited life in Iran; They were richly humanist works that show a sense of ironic humor and mix the boundaries between fiction and reality, the director often appearing on the screen as a version of himself.
The vigilant thing of “it was only an accident” is that he married Panahi’s spirit and humanism with real anger; If many of his previous films have rocked you to make his points on oppression and injustice, he is downright conflictual, from the moment his action begins with a man who moves away from a city of the night and to accidentally kill a dog.
This leads to a chain of coincidences: the car is in stands; A motorcyclist who passes offers to lend a hand if they come to the warehouse where he works; The boss of the cyclist hears the creak of the artificial leg of man and follows him at home; And the next thing you know, the apparently unhappy driver has been knocked out, attached and partially buried in a pit in the desert.
Vahid, the kidnapper, is sure that the man he has taken is Eqbal, alias Legg, an interrogator in Iranian prisons at a time when the dissidents were imprisoned, tortured and killed. “I know the creak of your artificial leg anywhere,” he shouts, weighing dirt on man.
“I lost my leg in an accident last year, the asshole!” The man shouts back. “Check my scars!” Vahid tears the man’s pants and checks the strain of his leg, which seems freshly red. But he is always convinced that it is Eqbal, which leads him through the city which collects a variety of friends who have also been imprisoned and mistreated, and who could be able to confirm the identity. There is the scientist in a bookstore, who urges the restraint and goes to Vahid to a wedding photographer (perhaps the first woman of a Panahi film not to wear a hijab), who leads the bride to be, then in elected Hamid, a powder head which cannot immediately identify the prisoner like Eqbal but who insists to kill him anyway.
All have nightmares of their time in prison, and all shelter a deep hatred of Eqbal, if that’s what they have. And yet, decency continues to surface too; At times, each character wants his captive to be dead and, at other times, he is inclined to mercy. When they end up with the woman and the daughter of their prisoner and the pregnant woman collapses, their mission of revenge makes a detour to bring the woman to the hospital. Eqbal even ends up paying the hospital’s bill and based the treating nurse, part of a joke which finds it stuck with the bill with each stop of their revenge meat.
The jokes, however, are subtle and pass quickly; Panahi is interested in people, but in this case, he measures an oppressive society that has raised and gathered an army of those who hate their oppressors. Moral ambiguity has always been a fertile terrain for the director, and sharpening his tone with other quieter films throws this ambiguity into net relief.
The film is still underestimated, because it is the style of the filmmaker. But there is an advantage to “it was only an accident”, which could be considered a turn on the “death and young girl” of Roman Polanski, although with more heart. It seems more difficult than many other Panahi films, hitting a furious peak in confrontation while the man removed is attached to a tree. In a festival full of fury, it is one of the scenes that strikes the hardest and resonates the longest.
As for the chances that Panahi remains for the cane ceremony on Saturday, it is difficult to bet against this possibility. The figure of the director standing on stage after being prohibited for so long is simply too irresistible, and the film is simply too good.
