Un Simple Accident

Iranian Tragi-Farce

It was Just An Accident - The co-author of this brilliant short film - Mehudi Mahmoudian, was only recently (17th February) released from an Iranian prison. A number of brave writers and journalists were released at the same time. They had been locked up for daring to sign the ‘Statement of Seventeen’ which condemned the policies of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Now, Khamenei is dead; a sacred martyr in the eyes of his supporters, a monstrous tyrant in the view of his foes - and, surely in the view of any rational person who contemplates the thousands he has killed, terrified, tortured. American and Israeli bombers are now pounding Teheran. Civilians are inevitably being killed. And in various other points in the Middle East - Dubai, Tel Aviv, Riyad, Abu Dhabi - Iranian missiles are demolishing tourist hotels and attempting to destroy American air-bases.

What utter hell.

The film It Was Just An Accident , written by Jafar Panahi

and Merhudi Mahmoudian, directed by Jafar Panahi, is a brilliant piece of work. It follows the Hitchcocky, Carol Reedish trick of starting the viewer off with a wild goose chase. A disabled man is driving his wife and kid in a car , and they accidentally run over a dog. They stop at a garage, because the accident has done damage to their car, and the mechanic, hearing the squeaking of the driver’s prosthetic leg, is taken back in memory to the horror of prison. Up to this point - the motor accident, the child, the leg - all our sympathies have been with the driver of the car - Eghbal, nicknamed Peg-Leg.

We slowly begin to realize that he is an utter monster. He is a religious fanatic who has tortured his victims in one of the gaols, reports of which sometimes reach us in the privileged , comfortable West. Such a fanatic as murdered the brother of our own good bishop of Chelmsford, Guli Francis Dehaqi; such a gaol as tortured and imprisoned Nazanin Zaghari Ratcliffe…

The garage mechanic’s hunch is that Peg-Leg is his torturer and he proceeds to try to bury him alive, but he is assailed by doubts. Suppose he has got it wrong? So he digs up Peg-Leg from the sand and drives him off to check with someone else who had been in prison - a bookseller called Salar. By now, Peg Leg is denying his own identity, so they go in search of some other victims to test his testimony. They light on a photographer called Shiva, who is taking pictures of bride and groom , Goli and Ali. Goli, the bride was also tortured by Peg Leg.

By now, this gang of friends and co-sufferers, one of whom is wearing the full rig of a Western bride in a long white dress and veil, are crashing round the outskirts of Teheran in a battered old car, with their torturer in the boot. Given the gruesome nature of the case, it is amazing that there are so many moments which are completely hilarious

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I won’t spoil things by telling you how the story ends. But I will spoil things a bit, by saying that it is a movingly humanist work of art. Peg-Leg’s brand of fanaticism is something which, alas, has been a feature of human life for thousands of years. It is what condemned Socrates and Jesus to death, after all; it is ‘l’Infame’ for whose end Voltaire and the Enlightenment called. It is alive and well in the Middle East, and yet, and yet…

The great religions of the world, as well as peddling appalling intolerance of the kind which the Iranian Government of Ayatollah Khamenei embodied, have carried within them the certainty of what Immanuel Kant called the Categorical Imperative; the knowledge that within us is Conscience, a Collective Subconscious, God, by whatever name you care to name it : the knowledge that some things are simply wrong, including the murder of someone you think deserves what is coming to him. We did not make up the moral code which mysteriously informs us,. and which human beings of different ages, cultures and backgrounds, all seem to agree. Hence the Platonism of a so-called Atheist such as Iris Murdoch.

Hence, too, perhaps the witness of the Bishop of Chelmsford, the Iranian daughter of the Bishop of Teheran , whose brother was murdered by the maniacs who support Khamenei. Here she is in her Teheran childhood.

That is what lies behind the excitement, comedy and conclusion of this completely inspired film, Un Simple Accident. . It deserved all the plaudits, and awards, including the Palme d’Or at Cannes last May. As the dreadful mayhem unfolds in the Middle East, with a clumsy, impulsive, changeable old US President, a total shyster in charge of Israel, and maniacs still controlling Iran, it is good to be reminded of the cleverness, humour, courage of the Iranian people whose ancient, sophisticated civilisation has been so disturbed, over the last century, by the discovery that this beautiful country where poets and philosophers and great architects have been living for generations, is also a giant oil field, one of the richest in the world - and hence a place which the greedy American Republic wants to dominate if not to own - provoking the inevitable reaction by religious revolutionaries like Peg-Leg and the late Ayatollah.

You could draw all sorts of lessons from history, or you could just say it was Un Simple Accident.