Review: IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT

Vahid, the boss of a garage, freezes when he hears a sound coming from one of his customers. It's a little squeak from a prosthetic leg. It takes him back to days in political prison when the torturer Pegleg was committing atrocities on a daily basis. He follows the man (with young family) home and then kidnaps him and prepares him for summary live burial in the desert. The man's pleas include a challenge to test his claim of mistaken identity and Vahid is struck with reasonable doubt that dances around with his righteous anger. So he phones some friends, or at least others who were imprisoned by the regime at the same time. They need a positive ID.

But they can't quite do it. The closest any of them get is something remembered from the darkness of a solitary confinement cell. Between them they still don't quite have enough to stop them killing an innocent and very unlucky man. By this time Vahid's van is crammed with a wedding photographer, her subjects including a bride to be in tiara and gown, a firebrand, and the war criminal/innocent man  packed into a coffin sized tool box.

Jafar Panahi's thriller has a story that has been told before. It's one that highlights the costs of totalitarian regimes and the crimes against humanity that nurture them. In this case the story has some more urgency, being from the current Iranian situation. Panahi has been a prisoner several times over in the regime's jails as well as house arrest. He has been generally forbidden to make films and famously made one by stealth while under house arrest title This is Not a Film.

Here, he is operating with loosened restrictions and presents this alarming tale in his usual neo-realist style, mixing muscular characterisation with enough comedy to smooth things while the ethics stay centre stage. There is one massive humanity-testing circumstance in the middle act that manages to be both funny and demoralising, another moment where officials expect kickbacks and things that should run smoothly are subject to wrinkles in the tape. 

Panahi does give us a conclusion (no spoilers) which is followed by a tense and almost eerie finale moment, shot with impeccible judgement. At a time when the world's news is loud with the actions of blustering tyrants and forced loyalties to atrocity organisations, we need this film. We need to remind ourselves of the terrifying decisions that await us when the curtain lifts to reveal danger from our own neighbourhoods. Think about it, it seems to call, just think.

Viewing notes: I went to a morning screening which was sparsely attended but did feature a couple of senior women at the back row who talked all through the trailers and commercials and then through the opening coprorate badges that inform that the movie is about to begin. They weren't loud but I hadn't paid to listen to them. I did as I no longer fret to do and turned until I located them and loudly intoned: "Excuse me. Please stop talking." They did, for the entire film. We need to do this more.

MIFF Session #9: TEHERAN TAXI

A film director hangs up his megaphone and gets in a taxi only he installs some Black Magic cameras in the dash and drives around to see what happens. He picks up a few people - cab sharing is normal in Teheran - and listens to them muse and argue. One guy recognises him and gets a lift to deliver bootleg movies on dvd banned in Iran. This takes them to a film student who picks up some discs and advice from the director. Then he picks up his niece who complains that she boasted about him to the friends waiting for her at the party they're going to and starts filming him with a point and shoot while talking about "unscreenable" films and the type of thing you can put into films as prescribed by her teacher.

The acting is naturalistic but pushed a little and you might start thinking, "so what?" Anyone can do that. I didn't care who knew and who didn't out of the pickups in Under The Skin, why should I care about this? Well, there's a reason for the teenage girl being so interested in what constitutes an acceptable film. The director we see at the wheel and whose work is on the screen was banned from making films for twenty years in Iran. What he's doing is illegal and could send him to prison. He made two in the confines of his house arrest and now he is making another about the world on the streets, morality, hope and the almost constant theme of crime and punishment.

While this might come across as a tad precious and forced it's worth remembering that the stakes here are high enough to have prevented him from including a title and cast sequence: naming names could put those people in jail, too. So, this is a severe diatribe against political oppression made watchable through worthiness? Actually, it's a fun ride with a near constant stream of real humour that allows a lot of the sadness, anger and injustice visibility. The wife of the accident victim at the beginning calls to secure a copy of the iphone footage he shot of the victim's spoken will and testament, it's a record of him and it's a will, just in case. The niece's shooting finds a wedding scene in which a street waif pockets some fallen money. She asks him to return it, less for the rectitude of the act than the appearance of it in the film she is shooting. His neighbour shows him CC footage of an attack by muggers as much to suggest film ideas as to share witness. We are in cinema as well as a cinema.

What that means is that this is still worth doing, not just worthy. Whether it's projected or played online the power of the wish of cinema remains. That's as true for a Michael Bay blockbuster as it is for this, I suppose, but, for all its contrivance, for all the pleading that knowing of its production circumstances must do, this still feels better.

There's almost too much to say about this. I'll leave it here and continue the absorption, knowing it will still be playing here behind my eyes days hence.