A simple accident on Canal Plus: a deserved Palme d’Or (review)
Jafar Panahi creates a drama through the absurd by examining the Machiavellian workings of the mullahs’ regime. With the help of an ultra-light device, the staging manages to permanently create axes of tension.
After winning the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2025, A Simple Accident was a great success in France, attracting more than 700,000 spectators to the cinema. Jafar Panahi’s film is broadcast for the first time this Tuesday evening on Canal Plus, and can be streamed on MyCanal.
Jafar Panahi65 years old, was well on the red steps last May, black glasses, gentle smile to present his latest born: A simple accident and receive the supreme laurels. The Iranian filmmaker, prevented from traveling and practicing his art by Iranian authorities who have been playing with his nerves since 2009, has always displayed incredible tenacity. Seeing him physically there, acclaimed by a movie-loving crowd grateful for his work (one of the most important in 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 an artistic and political manifesto. Last year it was his colleague and friend Mohammad Rasoulof who decided to leave his country (permanently) to defend his Wild Fig Tree Seeds.
A disciple of Abbas Kiarostami, of whom he was an assistant director, Jafar Panahi has retained from the master this precise art of directing aimed at constantly questioning the pretenses of reality. Clandestineness forces him to purify his staging as much as possible and find the lightest possible device to express himself. This produces a strict purity of the look. In the Iranian, the characters travel almost exclusively by car, both inside and outside the world, protected from necessarily dangerous exposure. Mobile cinema with sovereign horizontality which seeks to tear apart perspectives which inevitably disappear. This staging manages to create constantly renewed axes of tension. The fight allows no rest.
A simple accident logically begins in the passenger compartment of a vehicle. A couple in front, a restless child in the back, night all around and sudden jolts. Something went under the wheels. The man comes out, the red of the headlights giving him the appearance of a disturbing specter. The camera stays on his face. Barely two plans and already a whole world is getting organized. A tense world with carelessness broken in its course where the off-camera conceals everything or almost everything. Here it is through sound that the grafting of drama will soon take place. Soon a modest employee thinks he hears again the sounds of a particular approach, that of his tormentor who tortured him a few years ago. Doubt no longer seems permitted, although it is important to bring together your former partners in suffering to get to the bottom of it. They were blindfolded during their ordeal. The sounds but also the smells and a physical characteristic (their executioner had a prosthesis on one leg and protruding scars on the other) help to reconstruct the face of evil. This cinema sets all our senses in motion.
It is in a van that an entire society is now reconstituted. The body of the probable executioner was placed in a box while waiting to decide his fate. A fate that lies in the hands of a photographer, a bride and two men with opposite temperaments. Panahi deploys here a small theater of the absurd (Beckett’s classic, Waiting for Godot, is mentioned by name) capable of turning everything upside down in a fraction of a second. We also think of The New Monsters, a late masterpiece of Italian comedy, in this capacity to show all the administrative absurdity of a system imprisoned by its own logic. The words, the real muscle of the film and the omnipotence of the frame, question both the violence of power and the way in which it forces those who are its victims to find the right response. In this, the last shot, a marvel of expressive tension, leaves us speechless. Evil is there, just behind. Behind him. In us now. Powerful.
By Jafar Panahi With Vahid Mobasheri, Maria Afshari, Ebrahim Azizi… Duration 1h41.
