Panahi & Torture Porn

Jafah Panahi's Iranian Yek Tasadef Sadeh/It Was Just an Accident has become the film of the moment by default. Carrying off the Grand Prix at Cannes had already made it priority viewing but history caught up with Panahi, who was fronting a retrospective at the Sydney Film Festival when Israel started bombing the country from which he'd exiled himself. Panahi missed introducing the Sydney premier screening, the first ever for a paying audience we were told, caught up in frantic phoning home. Like his fellow Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof, as time passed, his work has become more serious and more substantial. Panahi has felt compelled to put on show his view of the Islamic Revolution and has been thrown into jail and home detention, banned from working or leaving the country - ineffectually, as is now widely documented. The controversy over his It Was Just an Accident, its faults and qualities, abruptly became incidental in the face of world events. 

Movies in which victims subsequently face their tormentors are not a new development. Include a couple of Arch of Triumphs (Lewis Milestone & Warris Hussein), John Huston's We Were Strangers, Costa Gavras' L'Aveu and Polanski's Death and the Maiden. None of those offer the farcical elements  Panahi chooses to include.

The film begins with family man Ebrahim Azizi, driving at night in the desert with his pregnant wife and excited young daughter. The subdued speech patterns repeat the manner of the Iranian films we know. 

Wild dogs scurrying through the beams of moving headlights make a striking image. Their car hits one and events take an unexpected turn when the family pulls into an isolated service point for emergency repairs. Owner "Jughgead" Vahid Mobasseri conceals himself and calls associates to tell them he has located "Eghbal The Gimp".  Out of sight, he strikes down the unsuspecting father (it's a long time since I've been in an audience where two thousand viewers gasp simultaneously) and sets about burying the man alive in the desert. However, the prisoner assures him that he is not the officer responsible for regime tortures he takes him to be, and that his amputated leg is the result of a more recent injury than the one suffered by the limping commander. 

Plagued by doubt and in the unaccustomed role of avenger, Mobasseri contacts a bookstore owner fellow victim for a positive identification and the man sends him to mutual acquaintance Mariam Afshar, who was not restricted by a blindfold (a motif in the film) in her confrontation with the sadist. Now a wedding photographer, she is doing pictures for another former prisoner Hadis Pakbaten and the girl's groom-to-be Majid Panahi. Still in their wedding finery, the pair are recruited along with Ashar's one-time fiancé Mohamad Ali  El Yasmehr. Divisions grow with Ashar reproaching El Yasmehr for his failing her in her time of emotional need and him turning on white collar worker groom Panahi for his risk-free lack of commitment. Elyasmehr, the most agro of the group, is the one to abandon them first.

Their deliberations are the heart of the It Was Just an Accident, mainly filmed in sustained mobile wide shots, as the group accuse one another of character failings, confront the hinderance of petty corruption of security men with their own credit terminals and hospital staff expecting cash and pastries as they deal with the captive's wife's delivery, of which the group become unwilling expediters. In with disturbing accounts of their former imprisonment - The Gimp placing blinfolded  Pakbaten on a scaffold for three hours, a noose round her neck with the threat of rape, so that she will go straight to hell, where a virgin would have entered heaven.  ISIS is invoked along with the reference to Samuel Beckett in the single tree desert setting. The film's mix of the ridiculous with the appalling is its unique quality.

  Jafah Panahi

The climax is a one-take monologue by Azizi,  his eyes covered, his body language minimised by being roped to a tree. He is the only member of the cast with extensive listed performer credits and he handles the extraordinary demands. Azizi dismisses his captors as people who have shown that they lack the resolve for the challenge they have chosen.

The ending is the extraordinary, sustained shot of the back of Mobasseri's head.

Predictably, It Was Just an Accident also carried off the Sydney Film Festival's Competition Prize. That would have happened with a less accomplished production.. 

As I was watching it, I had a growing sensation of familiarity - not just the deja vus expected from comparing the big Celebrity Director productions I've mentioned. There was clubbing the fiend and locking him away immobilised, the shovel in the vehicle, recruiting fellow victims and particularly facing uncertainty about his true identity. It took me a day to associate this with the 2013 Mi Mefakhed Mehaze'ev Hara/Big Bad Wolves from Israelis Aharon Keshales & Navot Papushadoan. That's not going to be a popular connection. Though the publicity says Quentin Tarantino no less claimed that Big Bad Wolves was the best film of its year, it was one of the nastiest video nasties. 

In that one, school girls are found murdered and violated - shown in disturbing detail. The jaded police officers discover her school teacher has a pedophile background and, once removed from the case and connection with the authorities, one goes vigilante. This is splatter film rather than festival fare but the matching details accumulate. I'd have liked to ask Panahi if he's seen the Israeli film or researched the same incidents.

Big Bad Wolves - Lior Ashkenazi, Rotem Keinan

Now, I don't want to jump into learning about life from Bugs Bunny the way Paddy Cheyevsky has William Holden accuse Faye Dunaway in Network. However, I can't help wondering about the resemblance between the new festival hit and the twelve-year-old exploitation film, coming from countries that are now busily reducing one another's cities to rubble. 

Think about Donald Trump berating the latte drinkers of Hollywood until George Clooney did that scorching open letter documenting their industry as a better expression of the American Dream than Trump's gaudy  Tower. We've got Trump and Hollywood in much the same relationship as the Ayatollahs and Rosoulov/Panahi or even popular Iranian films like the Sperm Whale comedies where nostalgic professionals celebrate their protestor youth by lip synching Grease's "Tell Me, Tell M, Tell Me" to a bootleg Betamax, Think of US comedy programs as our best commentary on the L.A.Riots (The Daily Show ran that marvelous shot of the girl demonstrator blowing soap bubbles at the National Guardsman in full armor, which didn't make it into news coverage) I recall Jennifer Reeder, director of her own accomplished ultra violence movie Knives and Skin, saying “In the Trump area, art & culture will save us.” I can't help feeling that somewhere in this jumble of ideology, opportunism, outrage and self-expression, there is a signal that's more significant than the ones we are getting. 

The movies told us about the so-called Sexual Revolution or the fall of Communism well before news media. Is it happening again and what is the message this time?

For a second opinion try https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rhxNDq5eT4