Truth and Consequences: IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT

A trouble with living in a society that allows for unaccountable government violence against those it deems a threat to the authoritarian government is the instability it breeds in the minds of men. When victims have no recourse for justice, of course they’ll be casting about for ways to giving their suffering meaning. How does one resist such wide-ranging wrongs without becoming one just as wrong? The great Iranian writer-director Jafar Panahi’s new film, It Was Just an Accident, follows a man named Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), a man who had been tortured by the Iranian government. Now free, he randomly encounters a man he thinks he recognizes as his torturer. He plots his revenge, proceeding as far as getting the man tied up in a hole in the dessert. As he pauses before burying the man alive, Vahid is struck by a glimmer of doubt. He needs to know he’s about to punish the right man. The film follows him as he drives the unconscious man around town, trying to get corroboration from others who were in the same cohort of the tortured. Panahi himself ran afoul of the Iranian government, receiving a 20-year ban on filmmaking in 2010 on charges of “propaganda” for such works as his 2006 movie Offside, a terrifically clever and moving picture of women soccer fans trying to sneak their way into the men-only crowd of a big match. He has continued to make films since that ban, and has just this year received a prison sentence in absentia while touring around the world with this one. It’d be a potent film even if you didn’t know his backstory. 

Here’s a dark, almost funny, setup with a ticking thriller spine to an ambling, attentive road movie. It finds two men bound by deadly force, either a cycle of retribution or one bad mistake. It has clear ethical force, and smartly complicated tensions and confusions. We want justice as much as Vahid, and strain to see if it’s about to be done, or if we’re about to witness yet another cruelty. Or maybe both. It’s clearly a work of moral interrogation, about wrongs and rights and the visceral mess in between. But it’s also a work of genuine humanity with characters who are real people, not points in a debate. As Vahid gathers his fellow witness, catching them in all states of life—from a cozy bookshop to a wedding photoshoot—and interrupting their quotidian with reminders of and threats for further violence. It’s a body-in-the-trunk movie, and that’s both the engine of its thematic interrogation and the cause for intensely intimate disclosures and disagreements. The situation is picking at scabs, and loosing deep wells of painful memory barely hidden just beneath the surface. Because Panahi’s cast of characters is so fully inhabited, breathing and pulsing, we can become so wrapped up in the complexities of their lives and this moment. We see something real and true, piercing and lingering, about the tensions and quandaries, the fears and failings of life in these trying times.