It Was Just an Accident (Yek tasadef sadeh)

 

Director Jafar Panahi

Panahi accepting the Palme d'Or at Cannes

IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT (Yek tasadef sadeh)                      B                                             Iran  France  Luxembourg  USA  (103 mi)  2025  d: Jafar Panahi

For the script, the initial idea came very quickly, I wondered what would happen if one of those around me in prison, once out, got their hands on someone who had inflicted torture and humiliation on him.  —Jafar Panahi

Winner of the Palme d’Or Award (1st Place) at Cannes, the first Iranian film to win the coveted prize since Abbas Kiarostami’s THE TASTE OF CHERRY (1997), where this may be a case of the Cannes jury awarding a twice imprisoned director based upon his life experiences as an artist whose work has been banned by an authoritarian regime, which helped shape his moral vision, as opposed to the film he has made, which sets no new cinematic standards, as it’s essentially the same ambiguous morality play he’s been making for the past fifteen years, no better and no worse.  Unlike his previous three films, TAXI (2015), 3 Faces (Se rokh) (2018), and No Bears (Khers nist) (2022), this one does not star the director in front of the camera.  Panahi shares a similar fate as his fellow persecuted Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof, whose films Manuscripts Don't Burn (Dast-neveshtehaa nemisoosand) (2013), 2020 Top Ten List #2 There Is No Evil (Sheytan vojud nadarad) (2020), and The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Dâne-ye anjîr-e ma'âbed) (2024) also reflect the same experience of imprisonment and torture, which this resembles in style and philosophy.  While an outraged free world is quick to award prizes and heap critical acclaim upon these films, it’s fair to question whether these prizes are deserving, as audiences in theaters are divided, many wondering what all the fuss is about.  In fact, one might even go so far as to think Panahi’s best films were actually made prior to his arrest, which would be THE WHITE BALLOON (1995), written by Abbas Kiarostami and winner of the Camera D’Or (Best First Feature) at Cannes, THE MIRROR (1997), winner of the Golden Leopard (1st Place) at the Locarno Festival, THE CIRCLE (2000), winner of the Golden Lion (1st Place) at Venice, CRIMSON GOLD (2003), winner of the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize (2nd place) at Cannes, and OFFSIDE (2006), winner of the Grand Jury Prize (2nd Place) at Berlin, where all but his first two films, which were made with government support and focused on children, have been banned from ever screening in Iran.  Whatever you happen to believe, his earlier films were not alike, showing more distinct differences in look, style, content, and thematic vision.  Since his arrest, they all seem to be part of the same vein, defying authorities by filming in secret with almost no money, smuggling the prints out of the country to be distributed in the West, elaborating on moral and philosophical dilemmas.  While they may be headier works, delving into ageless questions of the eternal, they can also be painstakingly frustrating to watch, with plenty of long takes (one near the end lasting nearly 12-minutes), as we bear witness to the effects of torture and trauma, leaving unanswered existential questions that linger long afterwards.  As if arising out of the claustrophobic setting of Roman Polanski’s DEATH AND THE MAIDEN  (1994), with similarities to Jonathan Millet’s recent GHOST TRAIL (2024), this is a blend of crime thriller and dark comedy, set over the course of a frenzied 24 hours, with pacing that is taut and unpredictable, as well as overt philosophical references to the absurdity of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which in this case refers to waiting for justice, where none of these flawed characters are particularly likeable, but that’s not the point, as it’s about people living under the brutal oppression of an authoritarian regime, who are thrust together and forced to have a reckoning with the past, where everyone deals with shared trauma in different ways, so the question becomes what would you the viewer do under similar circumstances?  Just how far are you willing to go, do they have the right man, what are the ramifications of torture in a police state when the killers are still walking among us, can the cycle of violence ever end, and just how does one eradicate evil?  It’s interesting how Panahi interjects children into the discussion, exerting a silent influence, where that innocence is a stark contrast to the murderous dirty work of their parents.  Panahi can now work safely in France, while continuing to live in Tehran, where this is France’s submission at the Oscars for the Best International Film.    

While it’s no small feat to live and survive under harshly oppressive circumstances, that strong-handed, authoritarian rule has become more commonplace around the world, where it may take more than a puzzling ambiguity and unanswerable moral questions to believe this is essential or groundbreaking cinema, though it does resort to a more straightforward narrative for the first time in a decade, where a dissection of modern Iran evolves into a comedy of errors, with much of this mirroring Paul Thomas Anderson’s American exposé in One Battle After Another (2025) which is also surprisingly prescient, where in each film it’s the prevalent use of humor that’s surprising for such a heavy subject matter, offering a humane complexity.  Nonetheless the highly distinguished Palme d’Or award universally recognizes the importance of artistic expression in defiance of repression.  Although Iranian New Wave cinema, especially after the Islamic Revolution (1979), accepted plenty of restrictions and censorship, Iranian directors were not discouraged and managed to create a new visual language in order to convey philosophic, tragic, and tenderly sweet messages from children that may be defined as a humanistic aesthetic, connecting art to the real-life contemporary problems of ordinary people in a near documentary style.  Key figures of the Iranian New Wave cinema movement would include Abbas Kiarostami, the undisputed pioneer of Iranian cinema, making films both before and after the revolution, Dariush Mehrjui, who moved from social issues to a more personal cinema, Majid Majidi, a poet of humanism, Mohsen Makhmalbaf and his wife Marziyeh Meshkini, and later his daughter Samira, filmmakers with a social conscience, followed by Panahi, the voice of resistance, making politically charged films that critique the Iranian government, Asghar Farhadi, the master of moral dilemmas, and Bahman Ghobadi, exploring the resilience and culture of the Kurdish people along the border.  Panahi began as a protégée of Kiarostami, and was originally sentenced in 2010 for his support of the Iranian Green Movement, imprisoned briefly, placed in solitary confinement and blindfolded when undergoing interrogation sessions, then placed under house arrest, where it would be more than a decade before he went to prison to serve his sentence, nonetheless he was banned from filmmaking, traveling, and speaking to the international press for 20 years.  However this did not deter him from making films in secret and working around the conditions of his sentence, but he was imprisoned initially in 2010, serving a few months before he was placed under house arrest awaiting his trial, and again in 2022, sent to the notorious Evin Prison, spending seven months until he was released the following year, but only after going on a hunger strike, with the conditions of his sentence finally lifted, allowing him to travel to Cannes for the first time since 2003 to collect the Palme d’Or in person, where he was welcomed like a conquering hero.  Jury president Juliette Binoche expressed solidarity with the then-imprisoned filmmaker at the 2010 Cannes award ceremony after receiving the Best Actress Award for her performance in Kiarostami’s CERTIFIED COPY.  Panahi stressed that this film was also made in secret, due to their explicit critiques of the authoritarian government and their history of ongoing violence, using limited resources, with some astonishing aspects to the editing by Amir Etminan (Editing in Secrecy: How Amir Etminan Cut Jafar Panahi's ...), which was also conducted in secret from a safehouse in Tehran, working completely alone, without an assistant or post-production team, shouldering the entire process himself, staying offline for safeguarding, using equipment that was far too small for all the footage, which was hidden in different locations across the city to evade raids.  Under constant threat of discovery, the risk was clear, that if discovered, he could potentially face potential arrest and a permanent ban from the country.  During the actual shoot, they were stopped by authorities at one point, but they were alerted with enough time to quickly remove all evidence of filming, so they were temporarily detained, but eventually let go. 

This film is a result of the director’s own experience in prison and what he endured, feeling very personal, which the filmmaker claims is “based on real events experienced by actual prisoners,” opening on a deserted highway outside Tehran late at night where there are no lights, as a husband Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi) driving with his pregnant wife and exuberantly playful daughter fatally runs over a dog, while also damaging his car, sending the young girl into despair, with her mother claiming “It was just an accident.”  This dialogue-heavy, neo-realist story sets the tone for what follows, as it’s a series of calamities that places ordinary individuals in precarious predicaments, each one having to answer for how they respond, with the film rooted in complex questions, while also exposing what appears to be a rampant societal epidemic of corrupt payoffs and blatantly forced tips.  Dropping his car into a nearby garage afterwards, the storyline shifts to Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), an unassuming Azerbaijani mechanic, who recognizes the sound of the man’s voice, and even more distinctive is the squeaking sound of his prosthetic leg, immediately recognizing him as Pegleg Eghbal, the notorious prison interrogator who mercilessly tortured him and other blindfolded political prisoners.  The next day, he follows and kidnaps the man in broad daylight, knocking him unconscious before dragging him into the desert to bury him alive, showing no mercy whatsoever, but when the man vehemently denies the accusations, Vahid hesitates, and seeks confirmation from a few of his fellow survivors, including Shiva (Mariam Afshari), a war-scarred photographer found in the middle of a wedding shoot, who doesn’t want to deal with this anymore, as she’s finally put her life back together, and goes hijab-less nearly the entire film.  The young married couple, still in their Western wedding attire, is Golrokh (Hadis Pakbaten, also without a hijab) and Ali (the director’s nephew Majid Panahi), both of whom share grudges against this man, as well as Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr), an impulsive hothead, a volatile former inmate who angrily wants to kill him on the spot.  Each recognizes a distinct mannerism, his smell, his limp, his tone, but no one is certain, as they were all blindfolded while tortured in prison, though Hamid thinks he recognizes the scars on the guard’s legs.  They all end up yelling and screaming at each other, arguing over what to do, their conflicted emotions inflamed by this prisoner, whose presence allows their traumatic memories to resurface, making them angry at what they were forced to endure.  With doubt creeping in, vengeance and justice blur, as they can’t decide for certain what they really want to do with this guy, only that the irrationality of their emotions is taking over, It Was Just an Accident new clip official from Cannes Film ...  YouTube (1:49), a scene that contains perhaps the most vulgar slew of curses in Farsi of any movie filmed and set in Iran, offering an uncensored representation of the anger and trauma held by Iranians who were persecuted by the regime and who managed to survive, while expressing that anger in public is grounds for arrest, encapsulating just how radical the film is and what it is trying to achieve.  Scorned by trauma, raging at the thought of exacting vengeance, the characters question how to plot their revenge, questioning whether they really want to become what he represents, merciless killers carrying out acts of horrific violence.  The cast is mostly made up of dedicated amateurs, who suddenly have a change of heart, conflicted by their nagging conscience, unable to find any acceptable solution, which only angers and disappoints them even more.  But one thing is clear, ordinary family man Eghbal is a despicable figure who sadistically carried out hideous crimes, leaving each one of them scarred and damaged for life, where there is no reprieve from the trauma that will forever haunt them, left to replay it in their minds over and over again, like a broken record.  Whatever the outcome, they have descended into an all-consuming hell that was inflicted upon them, where there is no escape.  Panahi shines a light on a grotesque aspect of the Islamic regime, yet in the end, even Eghbal is a human being, presenting the audience with an ethical dilemma, where audiences will wonder if retribution or redemption is the right course of action. 

Jafar Panahi and Martin Scorsese on It Was Just an Accident ...  YouTube (1:08:25)

Miroirs No. 3

 

Director Christian Petzold

Petzold with actress Paula Beer

MIROIRS NO. 3                   B+                                                                                           Germany  (86 mi)  2025  d: Christian Petzold

Another striking film from Christian Petzold, the maker of Yella (2007), Jerichow (2008), the first part of the Dreileben Trilogy, Beats Being Dead (Dreileben 1 - Etwas Besseres als den Tod) (2012), Barbara (2012), 2015 Top Ten List # 3 Phoenix (2014), 2018 Top Ten List #3 Transit, 2020 Top Ten List #6 Undine, and Afire (Roter Himmel) (2023), all films worth recommending, and this is no different.  No longer working within a historical framework, or a mythical tone, scaling back the ambitions and complexity in a smaller framework, offering a simpler, more minimalist premise, resembling the shortness and lightness of a François Ozon chamber drama, or even one of Éric Rohmer’s moral tales, with few characters, and the settings reduced to the bare essentials, yet this is told in a completely different manner, more distanced, introspective, and cleverly ambiguous, remaining emotionally dense while sustaining the interest throughout.  Some have described this as a Gothic fairy tale, a compilation of fantasy, imagination, and tragedy, much like 2020 Top Ten List #6 Undine, but this feels more like an odd encounter with grief, approaching the subject in an original way, turning a late summer film into a ghost story, as the film is haunted by ghosts of the past.  Once again writing his own story, premiering at the Director’s Fortnight section at Cannes, this accessible and extremely well-acted project is simply not like other films, where what starts out as one story morphs into a completely different story, adding even more interest and allure, as all the lead characters are likeable, where the audience is drawn into what will happen next.  A drama full of open secrets and the difficult search for healing, shot in the Uckermark, part of East Germany after the war, primarily using just two locations, and the linking passageway in between, where this is a portrait of people in transition, and about losing someone, as the way people deal with trauma and grief is decidedly different, yet extremely individualistic, where what works for one may not work for another.  In this case, the film views these aspects from different perspectives, like a collective community, though they all revolve around a self-absorbed central character who is our eyes and ears into what we’re seeing, offering no contextual backdrop information, yet mixing moments of absurd comedy with bleak tragedy.  Meet Laura (Petzold regular Paula Beer in their fourth collaboration), a university piano student from Berlin, who is out on a countryside jaunt with friends on a work/vacation trip when things take a tragic turn, as her overbearing boyfriend, Jakob (Philip Froissant), who she says “isn’t a proper boyfriend,” seems to be getting on her last nerve, as he’s reminded that she didn’t really want to go on this trip at all, irritated and upset that he’s forced to drive her back to the train station, until the red convertible car he’s driving suddenly swerves into an empty field and is killed on the spot, like the tragic car accident in Yella, while she is thrown away from the vehicle and is basically unharmed, but clearly in distress.  It’s a startling way for things to begin, but even more surprising is that she doesn’t wish to be taken to the hospital, but prefers to be cared for by a local woman she saw on the side of the road from the car, Betty (Barbara Auer, who starred in Petzold’s 2000 debut THE STATE I AM IN), who helps her up and walks her to her nearby home, curiously looking after her, where the two quickly become friends.  In something of a foreshadowing, it was Barbara’s face that Laura saw as they whizzed by just seconds before the crash, which takes place offscreen.

Even earlier, Laura is seen on the railing of an old bridge looking down at the water below, eventually making her way down to the river’s edge where she quietly takes in the natural sounds of birds and the trees rustling in the wind, staring silently as a man standing in a canoe slowly paddles by, like an image from Arnold Böcklin’s painting Isle of the Dead, Isle of the Dead (painting), suggestive of the ferryman Charon on the River Styx transporting bodies to the underworld, and much like Chantal Akerman’s use of Rachmaninoff’s The Isle of the Dead symphony in The Captive (La Captive) (2000).  This all happens quietly, with no explanation, allowing viewers to soak it in and decipher what they’re seeing, but an image of death haunts this film from the outset.  Laura appears to be a shadow of herself, and everywhere in the film hangs a similar dark mood, where even before the accident she seems to have been lost in a deep void, remaining something of an enigma through the entire film, but she is simply the vehicle through which Petzold tells his story.  Unlike Nina Hoss in Yella, whose character is already dead, but doesn’t know it, Betty essentially gives Laura a new start, two women from different generations, offering her own room, a fresh set of clothes, and a supportive ally, where they make a kind of special connection, showing her how to paint a fence, and providing her own bike to ride as they roam through the countryside together, MIROIRS NO. 3 Clip | TIFF 2025  YouTube (1:24).  Rather than feel remorse, Laura is surprisingly unaffected by the loss of her friend, indicating, “I should be sad, but I’m not.”  Yet what she does do is completely disassociate herself from her past life, retreating from the world to a place where life in the countryside is more peaceful and calm, more in touch with the basic everyday realities, where there’s literally no pressure on her, perhaps feeling a little too comfortable too quickly, until it becomes clear that this family is keeping a dark secret.  She’s surprised to learn that Betty has an estranged husband Richard (Matthias Brandt) and son Max (Enno Trebs) living a short distance away, working together in a garage, as both are handymen who work on cars and can fix just about anything, which is significant as Betty has a dripping faucet, a broken dishwasher, and a few other items in need of repair, but she’s hesitant to ask them, as they’ve grown apart recently.  Nonetheless, they all get together for a meal of potato and dumplings that Laura prepares, which goes well, like a peace offering, but the men are extremely reticent, as if remaining suspicious of Betty’s newly discovered friend, where what they all have in common is an inability to express their feelings, which leaves much unsaid and unexplained.  Repair appears to be a metaphor for broken families, with the drama focusing on the various ways a family can recover from its losses, as there’s something lingering under the surface, a common theme in multiple Petzold films.  Repairing the damage we see all around us is becoming more commonplace in the modern world, as so much is being destroyed right before our eyes, yet what’s interesting is that the filmmaker makes viewers aware of each new character’s point of view simply by the way scenes are shot by his longtime cameraman Hans Fromm, who has worked with Petzold since the beginning, creating a formally concealed world founded purely on carefully calibrated gazes and nuanced actions.  Christian Petzold is a skilled storyteller, and these multiple perspectives provide what amounts to subjective feelings and objective truths, establishing a rhythm of their subsequent interactions through a precision-based choreography of motion.

One of the best contemporary filmmakers, Petzold belongs to the Berlin School of Films, distinguished by the clarity of the places the characters inhabit, a house, a garden, a fence, the sun-kissed fields, a country road, a garage, where every detail reveals the feelings of the characters.  Music also plays a prominent part of the film, where the entitled impressionistic piece from Maurice Ravel is often heard in the background during the many travels through the countryside, Adriana von Franqué: Maurice Ravel - Une barque sur l'océan (Official Music Video) - MIROIRS NO. 3 YouTube (7:46).  One of the small moments that stands out in the early scenes is that Laura possesses a rare gift, as within seconds she can easily recognize what key a song is in that happens to be playing on the car radio.  We only later learn that she’s a piano student, with Betty expressing an interest in hearing her play, choosing a very recognizable Chopin piece, Prélude Op. 28, No. 4, considered to be one of the most famous of the Chopin preludes, which was played in its entirety by Jack Nicholson in Bob Rafelson’s FIVE EASY PIECES (`1970), five easy pieces - the chopin scene YouTube (3:13).  Laura’s level of comfort reaches a peak with a song playing in the garage when she arrives, sharing a beer with Max as they listen to an oldie but goodie from 1972, Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons - The Night (Official Audio) YouTube (3:25), with its infectious rhythm and beat, both seemingly swooning with happiness until she gets too close, where he violently pushes her away, knocking her to the ground, causing her to run away in utter fright at seemingly having unleashed a monster.  While the film contains many silences, smoking a cigarette in the evening light, or Betty standing at the front gate in the middle of the night when she can’t sleep, as if waiting for someone to arrive, the film slowly fills in the blanks, where Laura’s presence reminds this broken family of Betty’s daughter who tragically took her own life, with Laura situated in her room, wearing her old clothes, a constant reminder of what the family has lost.  With possible references to Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944), Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), or even Aki Kaurismäki’s THE MAN WITHOUT A PAST (2002), Laura offers a kind of identity substitution, yet she is no substitute for the family’s unending pain.  While the source of Laura’s anguish is unknown, Betty’s torment, on the other hand, is more clearly defined, as her family is carrying a recognizable trauma that visibly affects her life.  While both women have lost something, this film is not a tragedy, revealing instead how silence, restraint, and subtle emotion can make a deep impression.  It’s an interesting scenario, as it starts out being about Laura, but quickly turns into the dysfunctional family dynamic of Betty, where viewers can only imagine what they all feel.  That violent moment in the garage, however, seems to have awakened Laura from her reverie, as this little excursion into the countryside has made her painfully aware of everyone’s deficiencies, deciding immediately to return back to her life in Berlin, leaving without so much as uttering a word.  While remaining a quintessential women’s film, like Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955), essentially this is the tale of a return to life, with all that entails, the perception of a new light, or a positive wind, which translates into moments of absolute tenderness or even carefree joy, but also the hesitations, the uncertainties, and the embarrassment of those who must learn to feel again.  In the end we see Laura back at the conservatory playing her graduation piece, which is a return to the evocative Ravel piece, the third movement (A Boat on the Ocean) from a larger five-movement suite entitled Miroirs, filled with imagery and mood, yet what it evokes is the exact moment when the broken figures are reassembled, bringing the film full circle with an unconventional finale, offering no real revelation, instead conveying transcendence through art, though not quite having the same impact as the utterly sublime Debussy piece played at the end of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s TOKYO SONATA (2008), Tôkyô sonata - Kiyoshi Kurosawa (2008) - ending. YouTube (7:13).