Jafar Panahi, the controversial Iranian filmmaker, has to be right in whatever he does. He is , after all, an anti-establishment filmmaker haunted and jailed in Iran.
So let’s say, if Pahani made Dhurandhar, it would no longer be considered a propaganda film by the right wingers, but an anti-establishment film masquerading as propaganda.
Jafar Panahi’s latest work is at best bold and subversive. Is that enough reason to applaud and eulogize the film, and award it the highest honour at the Cannes Film Festival?
I am afraid I found It Is Just An Accident to be a bit of damper. It is shot with minimal menace and a lot of suppressed anger trying to whitewash itself with laughter. We are taken on a car ride with an Establishment man Iqbaal who has in the past probably tortured a bunch of rebels who are now trying to re-establish their lives in posture of normalcy.
We first have Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) capturing and trying to bury the man Iqbaal he suspects to be his torturer. To be sure that it is indeed the man he is looking for, Vahid drives down to meet other purported victims of torture by the sasame (small world!) whose only means of identifying their torturer Iqbaal is the sound of his prosthetic leg.
All this sounds poignant and dramatic on paper. But the execution of the suspect’s true identity is long-drawn and bereft of the humour and irony , rather the humour OF the irony,that director Jafar Panahi aims for.
The treatment of the potentially tense topic is turgid and lacklustre. Nowhere did I feel involved with the Shakespearean predicament of the torture survivors—to snuff or not to snuff–not even when Shiva (Mariam Afshari) speaks graphically of her torture.
Shiva speaks as if it happened to someone else. The out-of-body experience is compounded when the revenge seekers suddenly turn into a malenge of melodramatic human beings, taking Iqbal’s pregnant wife to the hospital, looking after his daughter, etc.
I won’t say this political drama is guilty of over-sentimentalizing the victims of political atrocities. But the storytelling lacks bite. It’s not as though the director, known for his outspokenness, doesn’t leg the extra mile. What stops Panahi from achieving the full potential of the subject is his endeavour to reach out to a global audience. The effort seems diluted, if not compromised.
