It Was Just An Accident begins with a family on a late-night car journey who ‘meet’ a dog on the dark road. The driver has a distinctive limp, and he’s recognised while asking for help for his broken down car. Before long, there’s a drugged body in the back of a van, along with a bride, her groom, her wedding photographer, another local man, and a shovel.
A group of Iranian dissidents think that they have stumbled upon the man they nicknamed ‘Peg Leg’ who tortured them. His identity takes time to prove. His fate takes even longer to decide.
Part road trip movie, part exploration of the merits of justice and revenge, It Was Just An Accident is often droll, sometimes farcical, at times emotionally wrought, but always measured. In the face of death, there’s also room for new life, a modicum of compassion, and a bribetastic mentality. The drawn-out plot together with the group’s diffidence reflect the moral struggle of sinking to the level of a torturer or retaining the upper hand without getting a satisfactory result.
Iranian director Jafar Panahi has been imprisoned multiple times and was banned from making films. He continues to work as a guerilla moviemaker, without permission and using small casts and minimal crew. His take on a society that lives in fear of state authorities is brave and informed. Even without this backstory, It Was Just An Accident is a classy piece of screenwriting, cinematography and filmmaking.
The Secret Agent heads back to the late 1970s and the Brazilian military dictatorship. Former teacher Armando (known by the alias Marcelo for much of the film) is on the run as a political refugee. He takes shelter in an apartment block run by a 77-year-old landlord in the city of Recife. But the safe house doesn’t provide all the protection he needs when a contract is taken out on him and comes under an active threat.
Cut into this sepia tale of living under threat are occasional scenes with modern-day researchers listening to old interviews from the resistance network who are able to piece together Armando’s fate. Watch out for the conjoined cats, and a missing leg which performs some neat karate moves (a distraction story planted in the media rather than the film swerving into magic realism).
While the grindhouse style is a strength, The Secret Agent’s unhurried (ie, monstrous) runtime (over two and a half hours) isn’t quite justified by the on-screen storytelling. Yet Kleber Mendonça Filho’s film still manages to be a vivid insight into a terrible period of Brazil’s history.
Sandwiched between these two stories of corruption and violence was A Private Life. Jodie Foster plays Lilian, an American psychoanalyst in Paris. Not all her clients are happy. One wants a refund for a decade or more of therapy after a simple trip to a cheap hypnotist helped him quit smoking the same day. Another client is dead, presumed to have taken her life. But Lilian wonders if there’s a darker reason for her death. Together with her optometrist ex-husband Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil), she delves into her dead client’s husband’s life and affairs.
As a fan of the MiniDisc format, it’s of particularly note that Lilian archives her client interviews using portable MiniDisc recorders. While Sony stopped selling MD devices in 2013, they only ceased production of blank MiniDiscs in January this year.
A Private Life feels like a rare opportunity to see Foster playing a comedy role, and only her third French-language film. The amateur sleuths aren’t afraid of bin-hoking or larceny. They get embroiled in plenty of false leads. But Lilian and Gabriel’s bonhomie and overthinking approach means that this 103-minute-long film could cheerfully have been extended.
A great Sunday at Belfast Film Festival which runs until Saturday 8 November.
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