Iran, France, Luxembourg, 2025
Directed by Jafar Panahi
With Vahid Mobasseri (Vahid), Ebrahim Azizi (Eghbal), Mariam Afshari (Shiva), Hadis Pakbaten (Golrokh), Majid Panahi (Ali), Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr (Hamid), Delmaz Najafi (Eghbal’s daughter)
It was, indeed, just a minor accident during a drive by night. It was very dark, with no streetlamp on that road stretching through a distant, countryside-like suburb of Tehran, the driver, although looking carefully straight ahead but teased by his cheerful daughter, could not have noticed in time the stray dog – and to keep from knocking down the animal, who died right away. But the shock of the collision was big enough to damage somehow the car’s engine. Luckily enough, a workshop was not very far, with a helpful mechanic.
Trouble is, the limp and the voice of the driver upset deeply the workshop’s boss, Vahid, as soon as he hears these sounds. The plump, round-faced fellow is immediately frozen and at the same time frantic. Bizarrely enough, he tries to alter his voice when the unknown asks where a needed toolbox is. And when the car, now fixed, starts, he rushes madly down the stairs leading from the office where he has been hiding to the floor of the workshop he runs to grab his aide’s motorbike in order to tail and to watch this driver.
An unexpected crash on the road turns out to be a blast from the past: this is the story of a man suspecting, thanks to a voice and a physical detail, to have found a nemesis he dared not to meet again even as this enemy has left searing memories quick to haunt the man. Vahid is sure he has found by chance Eghbal, the security official who tortured him years ago, when Vahid was a trade unionist working on a factory. And he is eager to avenge himself. The film would then depict the twists and turns of his vengeful plot as his victim, whom he kidnaps daringly in the broad daylight on a busy avenue, claims loudly Vahid is badly mistaken, succeeding in making Vahid doubt and prodding him into treading uncharted territories with unknown folks.
This is not really a novel screenplay idea. The plot of “Yek tasadef sadeh – It was Just an Accident” brings to mind readily the Roman Polanski little masterpiece “Death and The Maiden” (1994). But the differences are quite interesting to note.
Polanski settled for a tense face-to-face in an isolated locus, cut off from the world and easily morphing from the initial image of a nice seaside cottage to a grim prison shrouded by the night. The relentless, even mad, urge to punish also makes the highly-strung lead female character an increasingly violent and pervert tormentor. His film was a brilliant exploration of space and anger, strikingly unsettling and gripping.
Once again, some thirty years later, the movie camera observes the twin moral dilemma of delivering justice alone and on the spot, with no recourse to a judicial system on the one hand and on the other hand of accusing and punishing evildoers by resorting deliberately to the same barbaric methods they used against yourself. But Vahid proves far less fierce and brutal than his counterpart in the 1994 film (which was based on a play) – and more importantly, he would not act, rave, or doubt alone, but with four other characters, including one who is absolutely unrelated to the political battles where Eghbal played such a nefarious role against the others, and those five ordinary Iranians end up spending a day and an evening riding roads, moving into buildings, pacing sidewalks, and standing in barren, sun-baked patches of land thinking hard and arguing bitterly while a tied, gagged, and drugged Eghbal is locked up in a box in Vahid’s van.
Suffering is a personal experience but other people can go tragically through the same traumatic experience and a whole community looking hurt. The director’s point is precisely to show the far-reaching extent of the Islamic Republic regime’s brutality emphasizing a collective trauma making loyalty to the regime abhorrent. And the instances of petty corruption the group must deal with, either by private security guards or a public hospitals’ midwives, while adding another layer to the comic edges given adroitly to the narrative, bolster the feeling the regime is rotten to the core and impossible to embrace, making the career choice of an Eghbal a scandal but also the very brutality he displayed the only way for the regime to keep running – fear, of losing a job, a relative, life, being the best tool to deter those who are willing to oppose it or once did.
Indeed, after she hears what Vahid has to avow and to ask her, photographer Shiva rebuffs him frantically, wanting to forget about the past and to play it safe. But she has second thoughts and crucially tells what she has learned to the woman dressed as a bride she is portraying – Golrokh is not only a good friend of hers on the eve of her wedding to Ali but also a former opponent who was tortured by Eghbal. First shocked, she becomes eager to avenge herself, exactly like Vahid and to the distress of Ali, who is still forced to follow her and Shiva as they accept to help Vahid to check the identity of the man he kidnapped and to do something about him. Shiva knows someone who could even better than them all ascertain whether Eghbal is truly with them in the van. The man does indeed but causes more confusion: the ever-angry, ever-arguing, ever-crazy, ever-punching and kicking Hamid proves quite toxic and dismissive, paranoid to a fault and gnawed by never-ending grievances – which does not mean he is always wrong or clueless by the way.
The motley group badly struggles to decide how to punish the bird of prey who once had his claws on them and squabbles and mishaps litter their odd tour of the city. But the most striking twist comes when Vahid chooses to answer the ringing mobile phone of Eghbal – and starts to talk to Eghbal’s daughter, ending up carrying the wife and mother to a hospital so she can deliver safely. The bright and practical girl can be pleased, Vahid’s traveling companions less so. More disputes come and then Vahid and Shiva are left to themselves to deal with Eghbal. The moral tension is reaching now a climax: will the former victims of the professional executioner really become his improvised executioners? Compassion would prevail, despite the risks it carries and that the last scene potently suggests – though the final shots, and their soundtrack, also suggest compassion can be shared. It may look inconclusive but then the history of the regime is not over and so maybe the best can still be hoped unless worst things are in store as mankind is up to do anything.
Compared to his output of the previous years, “Yek tasadef sadeh” is clearly, visually and narratively, a more straightforward work by director Jafar Panahi. Sprinkled with ironic or farcical elements, his story has a clear didactic and moral underpinning which, as previously noted, are nothing new but are still relevant (yes, it is loudly emphatic about the regime’s cruelty but this is unsurprising from a man who was himself one of its victims). It is indeed the talent for comedy and the desire to delve into a group dynamic representing a collective trauma that renders his film surprising and interesting, with the best part lying in the chemistry between his compelling actors and the strong identity of his characters, from the fragile Vahid to the explosive Hamid.