An Eye for an Eye for an Eye: Review of It Just an Accident
★★★1/2
By Geoff Carter
Illustration by Michael DiMilo
We’re all familiar with the seemingly endless iterations of the revenge story. We’ve seen everything from Kill Bill(along with a lot of other Tarantino offerings), Nevada Smith, John Wick, Promising Young Woman, The Godfather, Sweeney Todd, and so on and so forth. Many of these films, most of them in fact, end violently, demonstrating an eye for an eye kind of sensibility—which, on the surface at least—seems fair.
Internalizing a protagonist’s pain and anger from a wrong and then accompanying that character on a mission of vengeance makes for the ultimate viewer type of proxy satisfaction. We understand John Wick’s anger—they killed his puppy. We understand why Cassie from Promising Young Woman has made it her mission to expose sexual predators and mete out her own brand of justice—her best friend was destroyed by a rape. And it feels good to see the bad guys get their comeuppance.
In most of these films, the remedy to avenge violence is more violence. While this approach seems just and satisfying, it does nothing to arrest the cycle of hate.
The nature of justice and retribution—and mercy and forgiveness—is one of the narrative strands in Jafar Panahi’s tragicomedy It Was Just an Accident.
At the beginning of the film, Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi) is driving with his family along a dark road when he accidentally hits and kills a dog. When he stops to get help to repair his car, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) who works in the garage, recognizes the distinctive squeaking of his prosthetic leg as that of the prison guard—Pegleg—who tortured him in prison. Vahid trails Eghbal to his home, and then whacks him with a shovel and throws him in the back of his van.
The next sequence begins with a shot of Vashid chest-deep in a grave he is digging. He throws Eghbal into the hole with the intention of burying him alive but relents when Eghbal points out the scarring on his residual limb are much fresher than they should be, casting doubts about Eghbal’s identity in Vashid’s mind.
Needing to know for sure, Vashid goes to his friend and fellow ex-prisoner Salar (Georges Hashemzadeh) to confirm his suspicions, but Salar refuses to help but refers him to Shiva (Mariam Afshari) another victim of Eghbal.
Vashid finds her as she is completing a wedding picture shoot for Goli (Hadis Hakbaten) and Ali (Maji Panahi). It turns out Goli was also in the same prison as Vashid and Shiva and insists on wreaking her own vengeance. When they view Eghbal in the van, Shiva thinks she recognizes his smell but isn’t sure. Goli cannot confirm his identity, either, but flies into a rage at the thought it might be him. Shiva and Vashid stop at a drugstore to pick up medication that will knock Eghbal out.
Shiva seeks out her friend Hamid (Mohammad Ali Elyasmehr), yet another ex-prisoner. Hamid joins the others in the back of Vashid’s van and says he is sure the man is Eghbal and attempts to strangle him. The others restrain him. In spite of Hamid’s certainty, the others are still not sure enough of Eghbal’s identity to kill him. Needing to be sure, they insist their tormentor must confess before they do anything. They drive about for some time, trying to decide what to do. While arguing and debating, they end up in the desert. Hamid vents relentlessly while the others grow more and more frustrated.
During the debate, Eghbal’s phone suddenly rings, and, against the advice of the others, Vashid answers. It is Eghbal’s seven-year-old daughter crying and calling for him because her mother has passed out on the floor.
The conspirators at this point find themselves at the morally gray intersection of justice and mercy. Should they go and help the innocent little girl, or should they continue on their mission to kill their tormentor, the girl’s father?
The poignancy—and absurdity—of this situation, the looming threat of their common human decency threatening to derail their bloodthirsty quest for revenge, is not only a perfect illustration of the absurdity of political violence, but it’s a brilliant example of the inherent—and unrelenting—absurdity of the human condition. Despite the anguish and horror and pain the dissidents endured at the hands of Eghbal, they find it exceedingly difficult to exact their revenge—to kill the man who has ruined their lives. Perhaps because they have endured so much pain, they cannot stand to inflict it. At any rate, they ultimately cannot resist doing the right thing, the moral thing, even in the face of all the pain and anguish they’ve endured. At one point, Shiva argues with Hamid that they can’t kill Eghba without confirming his identity because they would become “one of them”.
And, except for Hamid, the group cannot harm Pegleg. They rant, they rave, they foam at the mouth, and vent, but they just can’t bring themselves to kill a fellow human being, even one that has ruined their lives. Not that they seem more humane or benevolent or kind than anyone else. Indeed, Vashid whacks Eghbal with a shovel and attempted to bury him alive, but when confronted with the possibility he may not be the man who tortured them, he relents. Unlike Eghbal or the goons of the Iranian regime, Vashid and company cannot kill for an ideology or a principle—even a moral one.
This is the absurdity underlined by the constant and explicit references to Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett’s play about the absurdity of waiting for something that never arrives. The characters move and reason in circles, complain, bicker, and reason in circles, much like Vashid’s group of would-be assassins. At one point, he parks the van by a tree in the desert (the set of Godot) and the characters complain, bicker, and reason as they wait for Eghbal to awaken. One character even mentions seeing the play.
While It Was Just an Accident is an explicit condemnation of the authoritarian Iranian theocracy, it is also an examination of the absurdity of trying to find meaning in the intersections between justice and violence. In one of the final sequences, when Vahid and Shiva finally confront Eghbal and vent all their hatred and anger, the content repeats and repeats and repeats, Shiva demanding Eghbal say he’s sorry and then him finally saying he had to do it because he needed a job. The final absurdity in the film is that we are—despite politics—ultimately more alike than not.
Writer and director Jafar Panahi has been arrested and jailed by the Iranian government. For a time, he was forbidden to make films. Much of this particular movie was shot in Iran in secret. Panahi has lived through the oppression, the dissidence, the injustice of an oppressive government, and so the flashes of humor throughout the film, including the sequence with Goli decked out in her wedding finery attacking Eghbal, seem incongruous. Yet they are merely a byproduct of an absurd world turned on its head. An eye for an eye is called justice but is nothing but an absurdity. So is recognizing the enemy as yourself. So is forgiving the wolf for eating the flock.
On its face, It Was Just an Accident seems as if it’s a simple film. In reality, it exposes layer upon layer of moral and psychological complexity. It is not an examination of evil as much as it is an examination our most basic humanitarian instincts. In today’s political environment, it should be required viewing for every world citizen.
Comments