An Iranian Egybal, forty years old, behind the wheel of his car on a black road, the full headlights, sits with his wife, in the passenger seat, veiled and pregnant. On the back, his daughter appears in the middle of the two seats, dancing and laughing. Increase the sound of bass. The father extends. You are afraid of being dedicated to the cars that pass. It is dark. The little family hits an animal. He stops, stunned. Then they resume the way and ask a little more help to garage owners.
There, in view of Egybal, the mechanic, the ordinary type with a mustache, freezes. He believes that he recognized the thirst for blood that tortured him for hours when he was imprisoned, with bandaged eyes, by the Iranian authorities. His mischievous leg prosthesis as in prisons. His approach also, sincere and noisy, paralyzed, self -insurance, seems familiar. Immediately, he wants to take revenge. Then remove it to bury it alive. Until the doubt interferes. Then he returned to the capital and asks several former companions of procrastination, also with veiled eyes, who confirmed, or not, his identity.
The eleventh painting of the Iranian Jafar Panahi, crowned with the golden palm in May in Cannes and chosen to represent France in the 2026 Oscar, a thriller in the desert and the alleys of Tehran, begins in the dark and distrust. A kind of road movie Coral and tense on Iranian roads, by van. Some victims only come in their mouths, others just want to know, listen to an admission, say their trauma. Restore a form of justice for a while.
Carry
The director of Taxi Tehran (2015, Gold Bear for the best film in Berlinale), Three faces (2018, stage prize in Cannes) or None bear (2022, Special Jury Prize in Venice Mostra), 65, protected by Abbas Kiarostami, which was the deputy director in his youth, does not follow four paths. His film, made of turns and turns, poetry, moral dilemmas and faces of blood and blood, hyperan humans or in search of humanity, is above all a strong burden against the Iranian regime.
Jafar Panahi decompresses the Mulás regime, his intolerance, his fury, his surveillance totalization, his corruption. His abuse against all those who raise an eyebrow or think as opposed to him. It also portrays the trauma of their victims and the impossible horizon they have, between the need for justice and the desire for revenge. How to move on, maybe forgive? Get justice? Don’t they reproduce the same violence? Finally get out of prison?
Jafar Panahi also does not forget humor, at least at least, placing his characters a little burlescos around an absurd and tragic device. Then, the film advances, it rolls above all, sinks into the thriller and the ethical dilemmas (what to face this energetic whose worst atrocities we suspect?) And leads to a final around a tree trunk, surprising and magnificent.
Irreproachable
Cut to indignant, A simple accident Perhaps it is not the most surprising golden palm of the last decades, since it is in line with the Renaissance of Iranian cinema of the 2010-2020 years, carried by Mohammad Rasoulf (last year, it is brilliant Wild fig seedsmaybe even more nervous and intimate thanA simple accidentThe palm was lost little, still obtaining a special prize in Cannes), Asghar Farhadi, Saeed Roustaee and himself. But it has the quality of being ultra controlled, visually, writing, philosophically. Effective, therefore, even irreproachable: school will also say bad voices.
And then, it has the quality of only existing. When we know that its director, prevented him from circulating and exercising his art by the Islamic Republic since 2009, censored, imprisoned twice (markedly made a hunger and thirst strike during his second imprisonment, between July 2022 and February 2023, to denounce his detention conditions), turned), he turned A simple accident clandestinely, we say that man has a certain degree of courage. Your movie vibrates only more.
Source: BFM TV
