Film review

  • 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

  • Blue Moon

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Richard Linklater (2025)

    Robert Kaplow’s novel Me and Orson Welles, published in 2003, became a Richard Linklater film five years later.  Kaplow didn’t do the screenplay, but he has written this new Linklater picture.  Blue Moon, after a short, scene-setting prologue, comprises the events of a single night – 31 March 1943.  Like Me and Orson Welles, the piece derives from a particular matter of fact that Kaplow uses as the basis for larger dramatic invention.  His novel was inspired by a photograph in a 1937 issue of Theatre Arts Monthly of Orson Welles and an unknown young man:  Kaplow turned the latter into a stagestruck teenager who manages to get a small part in the Mercury Theatre’s Broadway production of Julius Caesar, which really happened that same year.  Blue Moon‘s starting point is that the last day of March in 1943 saw the Broadway opening night of Oklahoma!, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s first collaboration.  Kaplow’s main character is Rodgers’ former creative partner, Lorenz (Larry) Hart, who escapes from the theatre as soon as the curtain calls and audience applause for the new show begin.  He takes refuge in the saloon bar of Sardi’s restaurant, even though he knows an after-show party for Oklahoma! will soon be happening at the same venue.

    Before it does, Larry (Ethan Hawke) talks with, though chiefly at, Eddie the bartender (Bobby Cannavale), who knows him well, and the bar’s piano player Morty (Jonah Lees), who doesn’t.  Larry, whose alcoholism helped scupper his partnership with Rodgers, has been on the wagon recently, but he’ll fall off it before the evening’s out.  Early on, he flirts with a young man who delivers flowers to the bar, but those flowers are a gift for the young woman Larry’s due to see later.  Elizabeth Weiland is a Yale student eager to get into theatre production design; Larry, a self-described ‘omnisexual’, is infatuated with her, regardless of the age difference between them (he’s forty-seven and she’s twenty).  Their relationship has been conducted largely by correspondence, but Larry hopes against hope that tonight will be the night they make love for the first time – something that didn’t happen during a recent weekend they spent together.  Before his date with Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley), Larry wants, however, to talk show business with Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott), pitching an idea for reviving their musical alliance.

    Blue Moon is very agreeable to watch.  It’s consistently well-acted.  Its one hundred minutes pass quickly.  There are plenty of witty and some very funny lines (which there need to be, considering the total number of lines in Kaplow’s script).  But you’re starved of non-verbal action.  Except for the prologue (which will also be the epilogue) and the brief sequence in the St James Theatre for the Oklahoma! finale, Richard Linklater’s camera stays inside Sardi’s throughout.  I often moan that film versions of stage successes are wrong to lack confidence in their source material by opening things up – that when a filmmaker does that, it tends to dilute the original’s dramatic power – and Blue Moon looks every inch a theatre work put on screen.  It’s not, though:  Kaplow’s screenplay is based on letters exchanged by Lorenz Hart and Elizabeth Weiland, and the unity of time, place and action here is a self-imposed limitation.  The film is structured so as to enable a series of key conversations between the protagonist and another character, never mind that it’s unconvincing that these conversations take place as they do.  It might be possible to accept such unrealism in a single-set play in the theatre, where the characters have literally nowhere else to go.  In the naturally mobile medium of cinema, it’s another matter.

    Linklater has described what happens in the film as an ‘imagined’ evening.  Kaplow has said he doesn’t know that the after-show party for Oklahoma! was even held at Sardi’s and thinks it unlikely that, though Lorenz Hart may well have attended the show’s opening night, he put in an appearance at any such party.  This isn’t what’s implausible about the Blue Moon set-up, though:  it’s believable that Hart, as Kaplow and Ethan Hawke portray him, is masochist enough to undergo the Oklahoma! celebrations.  What’s incredible are dialogues between him and Rodgers, well written and played as these are.  It’s Rodgers who, spotting Larry in Sardi’s, first asks for ‘a couple of minutes’; the lengthy exchange that follows, and which isn’t the last of its kind, undermines the script’s conception of Rodgers.  He’s too coolly businesslike to devote so long, on this of all evenings, to someone whose increasingly unreliable timekeeping, the mornings after nights of heavy drinking, was a nail in the coffin of their musical collaborations.  By the same token, Elizabeth, supposedly eager for Larry to introduce her to Rodgers, shows no sign of impatience for this to happen:  Larry and she take just as long as the filmmakers need to make clear that, despite her affection for him, her suitor’s love is unrequited.  Once that’s done, of course, the introduction can go ahead, self-serving Rodgers can take an instant shine to Elizabeth’s beauty, and Larry can suffer the double whammy, as they head off for another party, of losing the pair of them together[1].

    There’s still plenty to admire in Blue Moon – the trompe l’oeil, for a start.  Lorenz Hart was 5’ 1”, Ethan Hawke is nine inches taller but he, Linklater and their colleagues manage the same trick that Philip Seymour Hoffman et al pulled off in Bennett Miller’s Capote (2005) – thanks to forced perspective, clever camera angles, the actor’s costuming and posture, and so on.  Hawke’s portrait of Hart never feels phony although it always seems quite gentle – this man is ruefully exasperated rather than bitterly resentful – and that may well reflect Linklater’s view of his subject.  Hawke handles his many lines dexterously; even so, it’s a wonder that those forced to listen to Larry in Sardi’s don’t tell him to shut up the odd time.  Perhaps that’s why a little scene in the gents’ makes the poignant impact that it does.  Larry and pianist Morty are in there at the same time.  Larry, talking non-stop, explains that bladder issues mean that peeing is for him nowadays ‘a two-act play’.  During the second act, he continues chattering at the urinal, his back to Morty.  It’s a few moments before Larry turns to see that his audience has left the stage.

    It’s quite a subtle touch too that, as the first-night press reviews for Oklahoma! roll in and Rodgers, Hammerstein (Simon Delaney) and their entourage have increasing reason to celebrate, Larry is de trop but not ignored at the party.  Kaplow supplies Hart with some good lines on the lyricist’s craft – observations that make it credible, as well as amusing, that he deplores not only the title song in Oklahoma! but also the title song of Linklater’s film (‘Worst thing I ever wrote,’ he says of the words to ‘Blue Moon’).  At the same time, when he goes on to deride Hammerstein’s lyrics for ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’’, you may feel (I did anyway) that pedantic infuriation has got the better of Larry.  An elephant’s eye in an Oklahoma cornfield, he insists, is plain ridiculous; yes, of course, yet it’s the randomness of that hyperbolic simile which makes it funny and charming.

    The film’s view of Richard Rodgers turns playing him into a rather thankless task, but it’s one that Andrew Scott executes acutely and discreetly.  It’s hard to steer clear of damning with faint praise most of the supporting cast since nearly all their characters are designed as feeds for the leading man.  That’s particularly true of barman Eddie, though Bobby Cannavale gives him real warmth.  As Elizabeth, Margaret Qualley does all that’s expected of her – it’s not Qualley’s fault that her role is thin.  Patrick Kennedy makes a nicely judged contribution as E B White, unaccompanied in the bar where he sits quietly, sipping his drink and jotting things down.  It may have helped Kennedy that White, unlike others, isn’t reduced to a device for Larry’s benefit – almost the reverse, in fact.  Larry tells him about the mouse he sees each morning in his apartment and White asks if the mouse has a name.  Larry gives the name; White, notebook and pen at the ready, asks if that’s ‘with a ‘u’ or a ‘w’’, and we realise this conversation is how Stuart Little began.  No doubt a purely fictitious conversation, but it makes for a refreshing moment in the story.

    The film’s prologue seems, by the end of Blue Moon, incongruously grim, as a drunken Larry collapses in a dark alley, the gloomy mood reinforced by the falling rain.  This leads into a radio bulletin, announcing the death of Lorenz Hart, at the age of forty-eight, and helpfully summarising the highlights of his career with Rodgers.  Then it’s a ‘Seven months earlier’ notice on the screen and Larry enters Sardi’s on the evening which will occupy the rest of the film until the reprise of his opening collapse, and text explaining where he died and confirming his immortality as a lyricist.  Hart’s life story is a sad one, yet Richard Linklater’s film has a strong nostalgic flavour.  The tunes played on the Sardi’s saloon bar piano aren’t exclusively Rodgers and Hart classics, but those are more than well represented in Morty’s selection.  Larry complains at one point that Oklahoma! is ‘nostalgic for a time that never existed’.  The years when Lorenz Hart was alive never existed for my generation, but the cultural ambience and references of Blue Moon are real.  This film is far from great cinema but it’s good enough to appreciate a great lyricist and, with regret and gratitude, evoke his world.

    7 December 2025

    [1] Even if that’s not quite what really happened.  Rodgers and Hart did team up again, after Oklahoma! opened, to write new songs for a revival of A Connecticut Yankee, which opened in November 1943.  The new songs included ‘To Keep My Love Alive’, Hart’s final lyric.  (According to Wikipedia, Hart ‘had taken off the night of the mid-November opening and was gone for two days. He was found in a hotel room ill from drink and was taken to Doctors Hospital, Upper East Side, but died within a few days’.)

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