A simple accident: a deserved golden palm (critic)
Jafar Panahi signs a drama by the absurd by auscultating the Machiavellian cogs of the mullahs regime. Using an ultralight device, the staging manages to create axes of tension permanently.
Jafar Panahi65, was on the red steps last May, dark glasses, sweet smile to present his latest: A simple accident And receive the Lauriers supremes there. The Iranian filmmaker, prevented from circulating and exercising his art by Iranian authorities who have played with his nerves since 2009, has always displayed incredible tenacity. Seeing him physically there, acclaimed by a grateful cinephile crowd towards his work (one of the most important of modern cinema) gives full meaning to a major event like the Cannes Film Festival. A place where more than elsewhere the symbol has the value of artistic and political manifesto. Last year it was his colleague and friend Mohammad Rasoulof who decided to leave (permanently) his country to defend his seeds of the wild fig.
Disciple of Abbas Kiarostami, of which he was the director director, Jafar Panahi kept the master’s precise art of the staging aimed at constantly questioning the pretenses of reality. The clandestinity forces him to purify his staging as much as possible and find the device as light as possible to express himself. This produces strict purity of the gaze. In Iranian, the characters move almost exclusively by car, both in and outside the world, protected from an necessarily dangerous exhibition. Mobile cinema with sovereign horizontality that seeks to tear up perspectives that necessarily hide. This staging manages to create constantly renewed axes of tensions. The fight allows no rest.
A simple accident logically starts in the passenger compartment of a vehicle. A couple in front, a child agitated in the back, at night all around and suddenly upheavals. Something went under the wheels. The man comes out, the red of the headlights give him the appearance of a disturbing spectrum. The camera stays on his face. Barely two plans and already a whole world is organizing. A world tense with carelessness in its race where the off scope conceals almost everything. Here it is through the sound that the transplant of drama will soon take place. Soon a modest employee believes that he reverses the noises of a particular approach, that of his executioner who tortured him a few years ago. Doubt no longer seems to be allowed, even that, it is advisable to bring together its former suffering partners to be clear. They had blindfolded during their ordeal. The sounds but also the smells and a physical characteristic (their executioner had a prosthesis with a leg and protruding scars on the other) help to reconstruct the face of evil. This cinema sets out all our senses in motion.
It is in a van that a whole company is now reconstituted. The probable executioner’s body was placed in a box while waiting to decide on its fate. A spell that holds in the hands of a photographer, a bride and two men with contrary temperaments. Panahi deploys here a small theater of the absurd (the classic of Beckett, while waiting for Godot, is named cited) capable of overthrowing everything in a fraction of a second. We also think of the new monsters, late masterpiece of Italian comedy, in this ability to show all the administrative absurdity of a system prisoner of clean logic. The word, a true muscle of the film and the omnipotence of the framework question both the violence of power and the way in which the latter obliges those who are victims to find the right answer. In this the last plan, a wonder of expressive tension, leaves us speechless. The evil is there, just behind. Behind him. In us now. Powerful.
From Jafar Panahi with Vahid Mobasheri, Maria Afshari, Ebrahim Azizi … Duration 1h41. Release on October 1, 2025
