It was just an Accident Jamal Panahi (2025; Iran Fr Lux) Vahid Mobasseri, Mariam Afsari
viewed Tyneside Cinema 9th Dec 2025; ticket £13.25
no accident
The core of Panahi’s film is the simple question of what it is to be human under extreme circumstances.
The opening sequence of ‘It was just an Accident’ is a compressed expression of some of Panahi’s main concerns. A car, man driving his wife beside him, travels through the night. Loud music playing and his excitable child in the back distract. Suddenly there’s a thud. The man gets out and finds that he has run over a dog, injured it, so he kills it. As he drives on his wife remarks in response to the child’s upset question: “It was just an accident…” She goes on to peddle some justificatory religious cant about it being God’s will, the dog’s death part of God’s design.
The driver as it turns out is the prison torturer who’s later taken hostage by one of his victims, the which provides the fulcrum for the film’s plot.
In ‘Taxi Tehran’ Panahi is asked by his niece how films start? Panahi tells her films start with a perception. A perception. Of course it depends on what sort of perception. Hollywood’s driving perception is that a film project will hit big at the box-office. Panahi’s ‘perception’ relates to a state of seeing, seeing something that warrants attention, that warrants a film.
Prior to making ‘It was just an Accident’ (JA) Panahi had spent some seven months in prison for subversive anti-Islamic State of Iran activities. This was not his first stretch inside Iran’s prison system where torture and maltreatment are routine concomitants of incarceration. But perhaps this last visit sharpened his insight into the differences between the victims of cruelty and its perpetrators. The difference between the corrupted and the innocent, the justified and the unjustified. A perception.
At the heart of the perception is a fundamental psychic contradiction between the prison officers and their helpless victims.
The former murder torture mutilate torment and subject their victims to psychological terror such as fake preparation for execution. They carry out their acts of violence on a daily routine basis, often in an arbitrary whimsical manner, without compunction. They wear the uniform that distinguishes them, marks them off, and which gives them the right to abuse the prisoners both for punishment and for extracting information. Their cruelty is mediated and condoned by the ideological corrosion of religion that declaims the implementation of a regime of death and torture as the immutable will of God. The God from whom they claim this dispensation is simply a hideous projection of the Islamic state’s desire to eradicate anyone who at any level opposes it. The prison officers have the basic attributes of a shared humanity stripped out of them unable to relate to the pain of others.
And the victims?
As Panahi observes. they suffer not just pain but horror of an enforced intimacy with those who inflict the pain both on themselves and others. In the closeness to their guards they become familiar with the face the body the voice of the tormentors as they torture and kill. The sufferer is released into a world of the imagination by their ordeal. How will they be able to get out of this darkness; to eat properly; to be with those tbey love; to take revenge on the killers and torturers who have smashed up their body and mind. The fantasy of having the tormenters in your grasp to do unto them as they did unto you. You’d kill them like a rabid dog. Wouldn’t you?
Black comedy.
But as to ‘revenge’ Panahi charts its course as something like a black comedy. Vahid kidnaps Eghbal (his prison torturer, nicknamed Pegleg) with the intention of taking his revenge by killing him. But as Vahid is in the process of burying Eghbal alive, Eghbal denies being Eghbal. Vahid, ‘suddenly’ doubtful, desists and having rendered Eghbal unconscious and stuffed him in a box, then proceeds to round of visitations to other political prisoners tortured by Pegleg. My thinking is that as the round of identification proceeds it becomes clear that although the victims want revenge they cannot carry through with it. Their individual suffering at the hands of Pegleg has perhaps deepened their feeling of what it is to be human of their gratitude for life. They cannot kill. They cannot torture. More than this their arroused compassion even extends farcically to saving the life of Pegleg’s wife. When finally Pegleg is trussed up like a turkey around the bole of a tree, with Vahid’s knife ready, he flings it down, Vahid cannot kill. What he and Shiva actually do is confront and challenge Pegleg passionately and verbally, to his face. They cannot harm him but they can shame him, confront him with what he is and what he has done to them. This is the time for truth. Truth is spoken as catharsis and vindication of the human spirit. And it breaks Pegleg open he understands and is overwhelmed by his own tears. He is released.
But Panahi’s instincts as a film maker leave him unable to end his film on anything other than a note of black comedy. In the course of JA we have heard how Pegleg could always be recognised by the sound he made as he walked: a shuffle then the thud of his wooden leg as it came down of the floor. A sound and a rhythm. In the final scene Vahid is in his workspace leaning over a bench. Behind him approaching he hears the familiar rhythmic sound of a shuffle followed by a thud. It is the Panahi’s final joke. The victim never knows…
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk
