'Hit the Road' (Iran, 2021), Director: Panah Panahi
Hit the Road is Iranian director Panah Panahi's sly, funny first feature. Panah is the son of internationally renowned film director Jafar Panahi (
The White Balloon,
Offside) whose humane, wry, defiant urban road movie,
Taxi Tehran, was reviewed in
Scottish Review when it was released in 2015.
Winner of the Golden Bear at that year's Berlin Film Festival, this was Panahi's third film since the Iranian state placed him under house arrest in 2010 for six years, and imposed a 20-year ban on his filmmaking and leaving Iran. The arrival of his son's feature in cinemas this year coincided with Jafar's further arrest, this time for protesting against the treatment of fellow dissident filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof. Jafar now faces a possible six years in jail.
Panah Panahi obtained permits from the authorities to make his film, though in common with his father's recent films, it is unlikely that it will be seen by anyone in Iran any time soon, as long as the present regime persists. As with so many Iranian films of recent years, much of the action in Panah's film takes place inside a moving vehicle. In this case, a road trip in an SUV by a family of four. A trip shrouded in evasion and mystery. A single, repeated piano note opens the film, followed by the first visual, a piano keyboard drawn on a massive plaster cast. As the camera pans out, the bearer of the cast is revealed to be a burly, bearded man lying inside a car. A small boy of about six is tapping out on the pretend keyboard the tune that is emerging from the film score (a Schubert piano sonata), an early hint of the cinematically playful treat we are about to experience.
The man, the boy's father, Khosro (Hassan Madjooni) is dozing in the back seat, while the boy's mother (the splendid Pantea Panahiha), head barely covered by a soft grey, elegantly worn headscarf, begins to wake up in the front passenger seat. The driver, who turns out to be their bespeckled elder son, Farid (Amin Simiar) paces about outside, smoking. First seen through the back window of the vehicle, which is parked on the shoulder of a country highway, he looks about 20.
A mobile phone rings, waking the mother. It belongs to the younger, piano-playing son (Rayan Sarlak) who, like his mother, remains unnamed. He had been told not to bring his phone; the others have left theirs behind. 'Search him. Open the door. Kick him out!' josses the father. The mother confiscates it, removing and destroying the sim card. 'She cut it!' wails the boy. 'It's the sim card, not your willy,' his father retorts.
So begins a journey, the purpose of which is never quite spelled out, though (spoiler alert) by midway through the film we know (if we haven't guessed already) that they are headed for the Turkish border so that Farid can be smuggled out of Iran to start a new life elsewhere. They have given up their house and sold their car (the one they are travelling in is hired) to pay the smugglers. We never learn the specific reason for his escape, though Farid's age suggests it may be to avoid the two-year mandatory military service required of all Iranian men before they can apply for a passport. He and his parents therefore know that he can never return as long as the current regime persists.
The secrecy pervading the trip derives from the need to hide this from the child who cannot be trusted to keep the secret in any encounters along the way. He has been told that the reason for the journey is that his brother is eloping. Other things are being kept from him too, such as that the family dog, who is a much less frisky presence in the car than the boy, is very ill.
The closeness and warmth within the family and the anguish of separation are expressed and repressed (because of the child) through exaggerated displays of gaiety, including the mother's exuberant lip-syncing and upper-body dancing to pre-revolutionary Iranian pop songs as the car bowls along. The young boy's irrepressible energy and elaborate responses to everything he encounters lends a real sense of spontaneity to the wordy observations about life that he spouts relentlessly, and which drive his parents to distraction. This is very funny, as when he frets and yells about how 'hundreds of people will worry if I don't answer my phone,' especially one, Ms Fakhrai, not the married woman of that name who is their neighbour, but her daughter, whom he intends to marry.
Even funnier is when he calls out to a passing biker and causes a crash. The ensuing scene inside the car, driving the Lance Armstrong-loving cyclist to safety, becomes an opportunity for a philosophical discourse on morality, law and obedience, the camera's quick-fire switching between the characters interspersed, with muttered asides from the mother to Khosro not to speak too freely. Such moments, part of a tradition of finding endless ways to exploit small spaces, are counterposed with quieter moments which evince profound love, as when the mother shares a cigarette with her older son, sitting side by side at a rest stop discussing his favourite film: Stanley Kubrick's
2001: A Space Odyssey.
In one gorgeous twilight longshot, cinematographer Amin Jafari captures the players as tiny figures dwarfed by a vast, darkening sky, a scene of almost unbearable separation, shot from a distance with heartrending reserve, which makes it all the more powerful.
Panah Panahi's formally inventive visual aesthetic of close-up framing and long takes evokes the intimacies and separations of the characters' journey far more effectively than words could ever do. One of the director's great strengths lies in leaving many things unsaid, especially, even, the most important things.
Hit the Road extends the lineage of modern Iranian cinema, launched 30 years ago to international acclaim by the films of the late Abbas Kiarostami, whose assistant was Jafar Panahi. Kiarostami's films are marked by a passionately attentive, documentary-like detail. Rooted in aspects of Iranian life that are largely banned from the screen, his work has been described as 'a symbolic cinema that disguises its symbols in local and practical details'. Panah's film honours the unhurried, self-reflective realism present in the best work of the Iranian so-called New Wave. It also brings a new energy and sense of fun into a cinematic tradition famed for its restraint.
What makes the film so enjoyable, despite the heartbreak at its core, is the effervescent interplay between its central characters. Madjooni's Khosro hides his distress behind a façade of grumpiness, while Panahiha is wonderful as the expressive, organised, dignified centre of the family group, frustrated at her men's vanities, and just occasionally allowing us to see the anguish behind her lip-syncing to banned pop songs.
Rayan Sarlak is everything we have come to expect from very young actors in Iranian cinema. As the ingenuous son, he is there to irritate, entertain and unwittingly reveal harsh truths. He is also there to remind us of the wonder and mystery of the world, which is given expression by his tendency to fall down on his knees, kiss the ground and praise the Almighty at the most inauspicious moments. Such superbly judged tragi-comic moments are sprinkled throughout Panahi's deceptively light-touch film, which constantly hovers between heartbreak and joy.
When the action of the film moves from the modern highway into the wild, passing through glorious orange-pink-coloured hilly peaks ('like pistacchios', observes the boy), arid sands and verdant landscapes, the family approaches the border and has a puzzling encounter with a shepherd that is conducted, it seems, in code. As the impending separation looms, clandestine negotiations are conducted with smugglers in the shadows. Suddenly, a masked motorcyclist arrives, soon followed by an astonishing scene of encamped families of other so-called 'travellers', conjuring up a kind of parallel outlaw society. This fantasy element is notched up when Panahi links our family's travels to a hilarious discussion between the boy and his father about the Batmobile, culminating in a flight into outer space.
This scene occurs soon after the most emotionally wrought event of the film, captured in a breathtaking wide shot. Under a twinkly star-studded sky, close to the border, Panahi nods to the audience (and to Stanley Kubrick) with a magical sequence that centres the film on the wide-eyed wonder of the young boy. It is an unforgettable image and a parting note of hope - a tricky tonal shift that is achieved with uncanny ease, one that just about justifies the film's appellation as 'a manifesto for the imaginative power of observation and the political power of imagination'.
Hit the Road is available on Mubi and in some cinemas.
Jean Barr is Emeritus Professor of Adult and Continuing Education at the University of Glasgow
