Panah Panahi's deceptively breezy road movie opens with the mournful strains of a Schubert sonata. A young boy mimes along with each note, bent over piano keys drawn onto an amply decorated leg cast, revealed by the gently drifting camera to belong to his dozing father.
The initial image – slightly disorienting, with the cast a strange, log-like shape dominating the frame – hints at the playful nature of the would-be pianist (Rayan Sarlak, a real livewire), but also at the deception that underpins this family road trip. (Why are no mobile phones allowed? Why are they in a borrowed car? And why is Farid, the elder son played by Amin Simiar, so tight-lipped?)
A deceptive bent also characterises the cinema of the Iranian New Wave, which Panahi's feature debut extends. The films of the 'new wave' that emerged in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution offered neo-realism warped by slippery, self-reflexive elements that made it hard to distinguish between documentary and fiction: filmmakers like the late Abbas Kiarostami and his protégé Jafar Panahi — father of Hit the Road's writer-director — sometimes play versions of themselves on screen, visibly nudging the action along.
Social commentary in Kiarostami's films tended to be subtle, coded so as to elude intervention by censorial hands. Panahi senior, less so: his work has seen him arrested and, in 2010, imprisoned on the charge of making propaganda against the Islamic Republic. (He was arrested again in July of this year, this time simply for making inquiries into the incarceration of fellow filmmakers Mohammad Rasoulof and Mostafa Al-Ahmad.)
"There are realities they don't want shown," Panahi tells his niece in Taxi (2015), alluding to the concept of Siahnamayi (literally, "portraying in black"), brandished by conservative Iranian critics at films that dare explore the injustices of contemporary life in the authoritarian nation.
Like the two films that preceded it (2011's This Is Not a Film and 2013's Closed Curtain), Taxi, a docufiction comprised of Panahi's conversations with the passengers he picks up while posing as a share taxi driver in Tehran, was made in secret, in defiance of the 20-year ban on filmmaking imposed on Panahi in 2010.
He again took up a driver's seat for his most recent feature, 3 Faces (2018), in which he and his friend Behnaz Jafari, a well-known Iranian actor, embarked on a (fictional) journey to the country's rural north-west in search of a young woman whose family are preventing her from attending drama school.
Hit the Road demonstrates that the younger Panahi – who worked as an editor on 3 Faces – takes after his insubordinate dad: the film is also a rambling, philosophically skewed rescue mission with a political subtext, though it's destined to conclude with a sorrowful farewell rather than a retrieval.
"Where are we?" asks the unnamed mother (Pantea Panahiha, stately and soulful) in the opening scene, blinking awake in the front seat of the car. "We're dead," comes the (also unnamed) kid's mock-solemn reply. (And the film's ensuing dialogue would suggest that gallows humour is a hereditary trait.)
While the boy is rather overstating the case, there's certainly a purgatorial feeling to the journey they're on.
As the landscape changes from parched camel-coloured hills to green ones and the dust gives way to mist, the mood in the car ratchets up in intensity, and the glances between the adults – mother, Mohammad Hassan Madjooni's hobbled father, and Farid – seem to acquire new and heavy layers of meaning. Only the youngest family member squirms and chatters freely, his chaotic ebullience providing them with some necessary distraction.
The close-up intimacy of the car trip is countered by cinematographer Amin Jafari's penchant for holding on sweeping, wide-angled exteriors, in which human figures – and their problems – lose their typically privileged place in the frame. An affinity for distance and stillness is characteristic of the Iranian New Wave, and helps to imbue its films with their meditative quality.
Hit the Road is less meta than much of this canon, however. Panahi's story-world is punctured only by a direct-to-camera lip-sync sequence that comes towards the end, set to one of the film's several invigorating rushes of old Iranian pop: "My dear kin, my tribesman, / you are riding the horse of exile / so proudly," mouths the littlest family member passionately, though he cannot yet comprehend the sentiment.
The surrealist touches that infiltrate the film's latter section – a bedtime story set against the backdrop of the night sky, with father, bundled into a reflective sleeping bag suit, appearing as a novelty-size star; a shot that speeds across the desert towards the horizon in homage to the tripped-out space-travel sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Farid's favourite film – point towards a new dimension of the cinematic sensibility passed onto Panahi.
But this is no calculated formal exercise. There is warmth, however bittersweet, and great tenderness in this portrait of a family knowingly charting a course for an unwanted and risky separation – this depth of feeling all too easily traced back to Panahi's own experience of a family imperilled.
Hit the Road is in cinemas now.
