It Was Just An Accident, 2025.
Written and Directed by Jafar Panahi.
Starring Vahid Mobasseri, Mariam Afshari, Ebrahim Azizi, Hadis Pakbaten, Majid Panahi, Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr, Delnaz Najafi, Afssaneh Najmabadi, and Georges Hashemzadeh.
SYNOPSIS:
A man kidnaps an intelligence agent he believes to have wronged him and plans to kill him but cannot confirm his identity.
It Was Just An Accident asks for patience upfront. Beginning with a couple driving down a dark road at night. Nothing else is visible but the man’s and the woman’s faces as they carry on a quiet conversation. Suddenly, a child is revealed bouncing up between them from the back seat, untethered and bothering the driving Dad, waving a stuffed animal in his face, asking to keep the loud music on as he concentrates on the road ahead, not looking back. Will she make him crash? Will she crash through the windshield? They hit something. And with that begins a chain of events that set off the next 24 hours.
With It Was Just An Accident, Jafar Panahi keeps the focus locked on his characters and stays there. There is no location more interesting than the human face, and over the course of the next 105 minutes, we stay with these distinct characters, never turning from their sight as we follow a day in their lives, primarily Vahid, a mechanic shop owner with a bad kidney.
What makes It Was Just An Accident so successful is how well all the characters are cast, all with distinct faces who mostly all feel like real people. Even the smaller characters like the security guards and nurses feel like a piece of the world as they humorously hound the main character for a tip; such is life. Everyone wants a piece, I suppose making a movie is similar.
The style of the film is unsophisticated, with simple blocking techniques. Panahi favours simple camera panning to cover the action over complicated dolly work. With the accident that opens the film, the camera is entirely locked on the Dad as he gets out of the vehicle to inspect the damage. The night is staged with care: every character’s face is always visible, if not to each other, then at least to the audience. (Take notes, Hollywood.) In this movie what we see and what we hear are often two different things. Panahi uses the simple panning technique later on to stage a kidnapping during a truck stop U-turn, then later with a telephoto lens as the van is getting away. The slow pan technique keeps the film grounded, and Panahi knows that you don’t need your camera to run all over the place to make a scene interesting, but rather use depth to allow the audience to engage with the image and let it unfold before our very eyes.
Shot in secret since the director has been banned by his country for making movies, Panahi has managed to make the most of his limited resources. Unsurprising, given he previously managed to make a movie starring himself set entirely in a taxi cab. It Was Just An Accident, despite taking place in multiple locations across the city never once feels like it is operating beyond its scope of its constraints. A small film, about a small group, that captures large truths about human behaviour.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Will Hume
