It’s a suitably arresting set-up for Jafar Panahi’s politically charged and darkly hilarious abduction movie – especially when it becomes clear what’s going on: impulsive mechanic Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) believes he’s caught the brutal interrogator who once tortured him for three months and left him scarred – a man given the epithets ‘Peg Leg’ and ‘the Gimp’ by his victims. The guy in cuffs has a prosthetic leg, just like the Gimp, who lost his fighting in Syria. It scans.
But like so much else in this blackly brilliant film, a question mark hangs over this Blood Simple-style scenario. Is this man, played by Ebrahim Azizi, really the author of his suffering or is he just a family man called Eghbal, as he claims? All the Gimp’s victims were blindfolded, so how can anyone be sure?
Panahi is a formidably courageous filmmaker who has spent time in jail at the hands of his country’s repressive regime. Here, he brings deep feeling to a movie that often plays closer to a straight comedy than a fiercer indictment of the state or a Munich-like morality tale about justice and vengeance.
You can definitely sense the directorial wish-fulfilment in the carnivalesque that follows as Vahid drags the drugged Eghbal around Tehran in his beat-up transit van, gathering a small band of fellow victims to help him identify the man and decide what to do with him. Joining this increasingly hapless quest are wedding snapper Shiva (Mariam Afshari), a soon-to-be newlywed couple (Hadis Pakbaten and Majid Panahi), and the relentlessly impulsive Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr). All have traumatic personal connects to the torturer.
Farhadi has a whale of a time taking the piss out of his country’s corruption
The director is clearly having a whale of a time taking the piss out of the corruption, cruelty and bribery rife in his country. One police officer even fishes out a card reader to take a bribe when the gang don’t have cash to hand to get out of a tight spot.
Panahi holds this tonal range expertly as laughs give away to a probing, philosophical third act that upends expectations in quietly thrilling style.
And there’s deep seriousness, and a streak of real darkness, beneath the big laughs. The fact that a soon-to-be-married couple, dressed in their wedding finery for a photoshoot that Vahid has interrupted, join the revenge mission is not just the punchline for some great jokes, it feels symbolic too. A Simple Accident is a journey through a county whose trauma still needs healing before healthy new bonds can begin to form. The question of how to achieve that lies at the heart of this masterful movie.
A Simple Accident premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.