Monthly Archives: December 2025

  • The Seventh Veil

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Compton Bennett (1945)

    The cinema audiences of ration-book Britain didn’t go short of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2.  Late November 1945 saw the premiere of David Lean’s Brief Encounter, in which the music famously plays a leading role.  The Seventh Veil had been released just a few weeks earlier.  Rachmaninov is on the soundtrack more briefly in Compton Bennett’s drama but still has a significant supporting part in the tale of Francesca Cunningham, a tormented young concert pianist, played by Ann Todd (a future Mrs David Lean).  On her concert debut, Francesca performs the Grieg Piano Concerto; as the audience bursts into applause, she faints and falls from the piano stool.  The aftermath of her rapturously received Rachmaninov is less startling but does mark a key point in Francesca’s relationship with Nicholas Cunningham (James Mason), her late father’s second cousin and, since she was in her mid-teens, orphaned Francesca’s legal guardian.

    Nicholas has supervised the development of her musical career astutely but with tyrannical possessiveness.  When she wanted to marry Peter Gay (Hugh McDermott), an American fellow student at the Royal College of Music, Nicholas promptly whisked Francesca off to Paris to continue her studies there, and she hasn’t seen Peter in the seven years since.  Straight after the Rachmaninov recital, she leaves the Royal Albert Hall, still in her stage costume, and takes a taxi to the night club where she and Peter used to meet.  He’s not there, but Francesca tracks him down to another club, where Peter is conducting the swing band he now leads.  Next moment, he and Francesca are waltzing together, to the signature tune of their earlier courtship.

    These events are introduced by Francesca’s voiceover, as she tells her life story to psychiatrist Dr Larsen (Herbert Lom).  She does so under narcosis and hypnosis, having refused to speak since a failed suicide attempt, which is The Seventh Veil‘s starting point.  Francesca’s more conventional doctors are uneasy about the use of hypnosis; Larsen explains to them his conviction that it can reveal a patient’s deepest secrets and thereby help cure their psychological hang-ups.  Hypnosis, says Larsen, is the means of divesting the mind of the seventh veil that Salome willingly threw off but which the human psyche is reluctant to remove.  The Seventh Veil is a highly entertaining melodrama, even if the stripping away of the title garment isn’t a very suspenseful process.  You don’t need a psychology degree to pick up the key details as the story moves along.

    When she and a friend misbehave at their boarding school, fourteen-year-old Francesca gets a cane across her hands as punishment.  This causes the hands to swell, just before she sits a piano examination, dashing her hopes of winning a music scholarship.  Nicholas, who walks with a cane (and a slight limp), repeatedly stresses to Francesca the importance of her hands (‘your only asset’).  Having learned from the brief reunion with Peter that he married after she disappeared to the continent, Francesca falls for Maxwell Leyden (Albert Lieven), an artist commissioned by Nicholas to paint her portrait.  She’s practising the adagio from Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No 8 as she tells Nicholas that she and Max are to live together in the artist’s villa in Italy.  The louder Nicholas shouts at her in response to this news, the louder she plays the music, to drown him out.  Exasperated, he whacks his cane down on the keyboard, narrowly missing her hands.  Francesca rushes downstairs and into the arms of Max, who drives her away in his car, only for it to crash.  When she comes to, in a nursing home bed, her hands are bandaged – not seriously injured but Francesca is convinced she’ll never play the piano again.  She escapes from the nursing home one night, hotfooting it to a bridge over the Thames, from which she jumps.  After being rescued from the water, she’s placed in a psychiatric clinic, under Larsen’s care.

    The main actors’ ages and appearances add an element of mystery to the heroine’s romantic life that her psychoanalysis lacks.  When she first meets her repressive guardian, Francesca calls him ‘Uncle Nicholas’, though he immediately instructs her to drop the uncle.  James Mason, thirty-six when The Seventh Veil was made, was two years younger than his female co-star.  Petite Ann Todd certainly passes for much less than her thirty-eight years, though it’s a stretch for her to play teenage Francesca in the extended flashbacks:  Todd must resort to more childish movements – swinging her legs as she sits in an armchair – for a semblance of plausibility.   (Odder than this is a cosmetic aid – the false eyelashes she wears, most obviously false in shots of Francesca lying unconscious in bed at the nursing home, the dark lashes salient against the white pillow.)  As Francesca’s suitors, Hugh McDermott and Albert Lieven, each of them just a few months older than Ann Todd, both look distinctly middle-aged.  They’re also, respectively, unexciting and unappealing screen presences.

    James Mason, an actor in a different class from the others and with charisma to burn, creates a man embittered by experience yet of indeterminate age, and hints to the audience – though Nicholas doesn’t admit this to himself, let alone to Francesca – that he’s interested in more than her pianistic promise and achievements.  As the finale approaches, you feel that if Francesca doesn’t choose Nicholas – in preference to either Peter (although he married, he also divorced) or Max (who verges on creepy) – it means her mental illness must be incurable, and that the filmmakers must be mad, too.  All concerned eventually show that they’re of sound mind, resulting in a happy ending to and for The Seventh Veil.  Helped by Dr Larsen to see the light – though less by words than by the repetition of music, especially the Beethoven adagio – Francesca is freed from her neurotic fears.  Peter and Max, with Larsen beside them, are spectators as she runs into Nicholas’ arms.  When Francesca impulsively hugged him in response to the news that she was heading for the Royal College of Music, Nicholas instantly and angrily pushed her away:  not this time.  The film’s happy ending came in the form of ticket sales.  It bested not only Brief Encounter but every other 1945 release at the British box office.

    The Seventh Veil also fared well in the international market and bore other fruit.  Ann Todd had been in films since the early 1930s, but this one transformed her standing, getting her a major role in Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case (1947), as well as in a succession of David Lean pictures a few years later – The Passionate Friends (1949), Madeleine (1950), The Sound Barrier (1952).  Although she superficially met the physical requirements of the Hitchcock ‘icy blonde’, Todd would continue to be a competent yet mechanical actress, her coldness permeative rather than a disguise for underlying passion or sensuality.  In The Seventh Veil, she gives a particularly conscientious performance, even if the storytelling and her limitations mean that the buried truth in Francesca is only shallowly interred.  The film was released in the US in early 1946 and, a year later, won for Muriel Box and her husband, Sydney (who also produced), the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

    That award, which seems almost comical now, illustrates the cachet of psychoanalytic drama in early post-war Hollywood.  This isn’t just a matter of respect for the bits of Freudian theory worked into a screen story.  Psychoanalysis seems to have been regarded as an emblem of high-class culture – in combination with plenty of classical music, this qualified The Seventh Veil to be taken more seriously than was merited.  (Chopin and Mozart also feature on the soundtrack, where Benjamin Frankel’s nicely melodramatic original score does its best to hold its own.)  That said, Compton Bennett and the Boxes did craft a more compact piece than Hitchcock’s Spellbound (also 1945).  A middle-European accent for the virtuoso psychoanalyst was meant to give this kind of movie extra credibility.  Ingrid Bergman obliged in Spellbound, and Herbert Lom does an excellent job in The Seventh Veil:  he’s magnetically expert.  Francesca couldn’t have been be forgiven for choosing Peter or Max, but there are moments when you wonder if Lom’s Dr Larsen might not be her best romantic as well as medical option (as Ingrid Bergman is for Gregory Peck’s troubled shrink in Spellbound).

    Eileen Joyce, regrettably uncredited, did Ann Todd’s piano playing, and there are strong, amusing contributions in two small roles.  Yvonne Owen is Susan, the school friend who gets Francesca into trouble and the caning when they’re fourteen, and evokes that unhappy memory by turning up in the dressing room on the night of Francesca’s concert debut (not so many years later but Susan’s already on to her second rich husband).  The reliable John Slater is James, a servant in Nicholas’ ‘bachelor establishment’:  not only is the place’s owner an unmarried man, so are all his several house staff.  Nicholas also supposedly has cats:  at least, when Francesca says she’s allergic to them, her guardian tells her she’ll get used to them in the house.  But there only seems to be one cat, which hardly appears subsequently.  The Seventh Veil is highly enjoyable, but you can’t help thinking it would have been even more absorbing with Dr Larsen trying to get inside the head of James Mason’s Nicholas Cunningham.

    23 December 2025

  • It Was Just an Accident

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Yek tasadof-e sadeh

    Jafar Panahi (2025)

    A man (Ebrahim Azizi), driving at night with his pregnant wife (Afssaneh Najmabadi) and their daughter (Delnaz Najafi), accidentally hits and kills a dog on the road.  The collision results in minor damage to the man’s car.  Next day, he takes it to a local garage for repairs.  The man has a prosthetic leg.  One of the mechanics, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), recognises the squeaking sound the leg makes.  Its owner phones his mother while he’s at the garage.  The mechanic thinks he recognises the man’s voice, too.  Vahid believes this is Eghbal, nicknamed ‘Peg Leg’, who tortured Vahid and others in the Iranian jail where they were once held as political prisoners.  Vahid can’t be 100% certain – the prisoners were forced to wear blindfolds – but he’s sure enough this is Eghbal to kidnap the man, also now blindfolded.  Vahid drives to a desert location outside Tehran, where he prepares to bury his captive alive.  The man does have a prosthetic leg but insists that, unlike Eghbal, he lost the limb only recently.  He begs for mercy and Vahid decides to get a second opinion on his identity.  After knocking the man out with a shovel, Vahid drags him into the back of his van, bundles his unconscious body into a large, secured box, and returns to the city.

    These are the early stages of Iranian writer-director Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, which combines realistic physical settings and action with structured and deliberate political messaging.  The different characters joining the story represent distinct points of view.  Vahid calls at the Tehran bookshop run by Salar (Georges Hashemzadeh), his friend and erstwhile political ally.  Salar is shocked to learn what Vahid has done and unwilling to get involved, beyond pointing Vahid in the direction of a mutual acquaintance who may be able to identify Eghbal.  This is Shiva (Mariam Afshari), a photographer.  When Vahid tracks her down, Shiva is taking photos of a couple who are to be married next day (Hadis Pakbaten and Majid Panahi) and already dressed for their wedding:  bride-to-be Goli, like Vahid and Shiva, was among Peg Leg’s torture victims in jail but isn’t sure if he’s the man inside Vahid’s van in a prospective coffin.  Shiva thinks she recognises Eghbal’s smell but is reluctant to commit herself.  Having drugged the captive and plugged his ears, the group set off to find Shiva’s ex-partner, Hamid (Mohammad Ali Elyasmehr), who also suffered at Eghbal’s hands.  Hamid is certain this is Peg Leg and wants to kill him without further ado.

    It Was Just an Accident is getting overwhelmingly positive critical notices (currently 98% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, from 181 reviews).  One reason for this, although it probably counts for less than Panahi’s extensive personal experience on the receiving end of Iran’s authoritarian theocracy (more on that below), is a highly concentrated storyline which, for many people, may increase the narrative’s intensity.   I felt it made the film monotonous.  The opinions of Eghbal’s captors (he eventually admits to being who they claim he is), whatever they may be, are expressed in noisy disagreements with each other.  As the drama approaches its climax, Vahid and Shiva drive Eghbal to another desert location, in which stands a single tree.  Small, thin and leafless, it immediately calls to mind – as Panahi intends, and as Shiva therefore says – the tree on the set of Waiting for Godot.  Panahi’s characters are going through an existential crisis of sorts and impelled to ask themselves what they should do, even how life can be worth living, under a tyrannical political regime.  Their plight doesn’t really chime, though, with that of Beckett’s characters – and not simply because It Was Just an Accident is nothing if not eventful.  If only the film’s grim themes played out with more of Beckett’s tonal variety and gallows humour.

    Reproaching Vahid for abducting Eghbal, Salar warns his friend that, ‘We aren’t killers – we’re not like him’.  Eghbal’s reprieve from the desert grave is the first of several illustrations of Salar’s words.  Hamid is the only character who unequivocally wants to murder Eghbal; as Vahid and Shiva try to dissuade him from turning word into instant deed, Eghbal’s phone rings.  His young daughter is calling, in great distress because her mother is unconscious.  Vahid et al head to the family home from where they drive the heavily pregnant woman and her little girl to a hospital.  The mother gives birth to a boy.  In the second desert episode, Vahid and Shiva tie Eghbal to the barren tree and use threats to make him confess; in doing so, they tell him he has a newborn son and remind him of their own ordeals in prison.  When Eghbal claims he was only doing a job, Vahid shows mercy again.  Before he and Shiva drive off, Vahid even gives Eghbal basic information on how to make his way to a main road, presumably to summon help.

    Although it feels overdone, the humanity shown by Vahid and Shiva, towards first Eghbal’s family and eventually the ex-torturer himself, has the virtue of paving the way for the film’s closing scene, which is also its best.  Vahid is loading stuff into his van for his mother and sister; as he goes into the house to fetch something more for the van, he’s stopped in his tracks by a familiar squeaking sound.  As the sound gradually increases and Vahid stands frozen to the spot, Panahi holds a rearview shot of his head.  The scene, unlike most of those that have gone before, is powerfully ambiguous.  The possibility that this really is Eghbal approaching, to take his own revenge, makes it unnerving, gives Salar’s ‘We’re not killers – we’re not like him’ a new resonance, and reflects the impossible predicament of those who, like Vahid, can’t quite emulate their persecutors’ inhumanity.  If, on the other hand, Vahid is imagining the sound of the squeaking gait, it serves as grim confirmation that he’ll never get Peg Leg out of his mind.  Panahi’s choice of the back of Vahid’s head as his final image may indicate the latter, but the audience can’t be sure.

    Jafar Panahi’s films have fared well at major festivals for many years – from the Venice Golden Lion for The Circle as long ago as 2000, to the Berlin Golden Bear for Taxi in 2015 – but It Was Just an Accident is taking his work to new levels of international recognition.  It won the Cannes Palme d’Or in May and has already been named 2025’s best foreign language film (or equivalent) by several US bodies.  It looks nailed on for a Best International Film Oscar nomination and may well end up winning (a co-production involving Iran, Luxembourg and France, it’s been submitted to the Academy as the French entry for the award).  Panahi was named Best Director of the year by the New York Film Critics Circle.  He’s nominated in the same category at the Golden Globes, where It Was Just an Accident also has nods for Best Drama and Best Screenplay, as well as Best Foreign Language Film.  Is this new film, Panahi’s eleventh feature, in a different cinematic class from all its predecessors?  I’ve seen only two of them, This Is Not a Film (2011) and Taxi, but those are enough for me to say I don’t think it is.  Why, then, is this latest picture receiving such unprecedented acclaim?  I think for two, connected reasons.

    First, because Panahi’s liberty, as both filmmaker and private citizen, has been severely compromised for more than twenty years and still is.  Earlier this month, he was convicted of ‘propaganda activities’ against Iran and sentenced to a year in prison, with longer bans on travel outside the country and on joining any political organisation.  Panahi received the Iranian court’s sentence in absentia – he was in New York collecting Gotham awards at the time – but it’s clear from a recent interview he gave in Los Angeles that he’s not planning to leave his homeland permanently.  He referred to a conversation he’d had in LA with an elderly Iranian exile:  ‘She begged me not to go back to Iran.  But I told her I can’t live outside Iran.  I can’t adapt to anywhere else’.  (These details are from Wikipedia.)  Panahi’s extraordinary circumstances make it hard, in assessing his films’ merits, not to apply extraordinary criteria.  As the Rotten Tomatoes headline for Danny Leigh’s five-star review of It Was Just an Accident in the Financial Times says, ‘As with all Panahi’s work, you applaud the simple fact of its existence’.

    Yet the different scale of reaction to this film points to the second of those connected reasons.  The growing politicisation of cinema reviewing continues apace – especially, and understandably, in the US.  Increasingly, a film’s subject counts for more than how well or imaginatively it’s made.  That seems the only conceivable explanation of critical enthusiasm for a movie as mediocre as Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, to give a recent example.  Unlike Sinners, It Was Just an Accident won’t also be a box-office smash but that makes it easier to admire:  Panahi is politically engaged and has the scars to prove it, while being commercially unconcerned.  The politicising cuts both ways, of course:  Armond White’s negative review of It Was Just an Accident in National Review is repugnant evidence of that.  Until recently, White’s obsession with what he sees as the evils of the American liberal establishment hasn’t blinded him to the merits of certain films made by liberals working outside the US (Mike Leigh and François Ozon, for example).  His railing against Panahi suggests that an overseas director is now beyond the pale if their film is even liable to appeal to American liberals.  A few paragraphs of his invective might tempt any reasonable filmgoer to turn cast-iron cheerleader for It Was Just an Accident, but if Armond White can lead us into temptation, there’s not much hope for fair-minded criticism.  So …

    That closing shot of the back of the protagonist’s head in Panahi’s film echoes, presumably by coincidence, the closing shot of Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha’s My Favourite Cake (2024) – another Iranian film and, I reckon, a better one than this.

    15 December 2025

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