Hit the road (2021)

This is an iranian road trip comedy drama. The summary is: it’s really good. Probably the best film i’ve seen this year so far.

It’s not perfect, and i have exactly two things i didn’t like about it: the first is that the younger brother can sometimes maybe be a teeny tiny bit really very quite annoying; loud and precocious and joyfully depressed in an Anne Shirley sort of way, and sometimes that can be a little bit too much; the second is that the film has a really nice and moving ending, and then it doesn’t end and has another really nice and moving ending, and then it doesn’t end and has anther really nice and moving ending. All three of the endings were really nice and moving, but by the time the third one happened i was kind of ready for it to actually end, because it had set up that many endings. So there are the two bad things about the film.

Now for the good things. There’s my usual checkboxes like the length being a lovely ninety-three minutes in total, the excellent music, the believable acting (although of course, the language barrier means that it’s harder for me to tell if the speech is wooden or not). But there’s more than that. The camera work is delightful and like a zig-zag. Most of the shots take place within a cramped car, spinning around to view one and a half characters at a time. Most of the other shots are huge landscape paintings with the characters a hundred metres away, tiny specs with vast distances between one another. The contrast shows a beautiful country and a trapped family. There are jokes throughout which range from funny to hilarious. The other iranian films i’ve watched have tended towards serious and as such i wasn’t familiar with what iranian humour felt like, and it turns out that i like it a lot. Quite dry, quite morbid.

I read some of the reviews online, and people love to talk about the iranian government and what they might think about this film. There are a handful of countries that, when they release some kind of art, it always has to be read as some kind of a commentary on the political situation. And i’m not going to argue that there’s never a tie between politics and art, and i’m not going to argue that in this particular case there is no political influence in the story, because their obviously is; but if all you can glean from this is some lukewarm political take, you are missing the point. The director of this film, and the actors in this film, and everyone else involved in this film has made something that demonstrates their deep love for iran the country, and passes almost no comment on iran the state. The focus of this film is a family travelling together, growing closer and further away from each other, and coping with their feelings and trying to express their feelings to one another in the best possible way. It’s a film about family, and that’s a universal story.

The film is poignant, and Farshad (who has also written about this film) told me that some of the decisions, like the visibility of the mother’s hair and the singing, are not permitted in iran. Even so, the film doesn’t feel like it’s trying to be subversive or have some underlying political commentary. It’s a bittersweet film that just happens to be embedded in the cultural environment of a country that isn’t the united states of america, and that doesn’t need to be so politicised. Honestly, when i think of iran i don’t have scenes of beautiful landscapes in my head because the only time that iran gets talked about in the british media is when we are talking about the political situation. We don’t get nature documentaries filmed in iran, only footage of fallout. There is an immense bias even against the ordinary citizens of iran among people in the uk and yet we don’t know anything about the country. So it feels ridiculous to me that people can so confidently make ostensibly deep analyses into the political undertones of a film when i can confidently say they probably know nothing about iran.

And i don’t mean to imply that i am some kind of expert on iran because i am not. I’m just a bit disappointed at the pretentious windbaggery that accompanies the release of any film from any country that europe or the usa are not the best of friends with. The film is about a person who has to leave a country, and the means they use to do so are not exactly above board. We know that they are not solo rebels because there is a whole community and ecosystem of people taking part in this procedure. This is a part of the life and culture of the film. But this political messaging is not why this film is worth watching.

This film is good because the director wanted to make a particular film and he followed through on making that film. He knew how he wanted the father and the mother and the two brothers to behave, and he found four actors who were perfect fits for those roles. Their personalities are all caricatures, but are not so eccentric as to my unbelievable. They are distinct, and yet together they form an equilibrium. The film explores what it is like for that equilibrium to be upset by one of the family members having to leave. And the film does a really good job of explaining that.

We are passengers in the journey, and we are strangers. At one point a cyclist with dubious morals joins for a ride, and we learn more about him over the next ten minutes than we’ve learnt about any one of the family so far. We’ve heard the most from the younger brother, but most of what he says is hilarious nonsense. He doesn’t understand what’s going on, and he continues to not understand throughout the film. As the mother cries and says goodbye to her eldest son for the last time, on the other side of the frame the younger brother is still screaming, tied to a tree. This is the only way it could work out.

The film is good because most of the dialogue is not advancing the story. It is four people chatting shit about each other as a way to kill time on a long journey. It shows us what they are thinking. It opens us up to their sense of humour and their inside jokes and the ways that they see the world. You should smoke less, the mother says, giving her son a cigarette. I’m embarrassed of myself, the father does not say, but implies through insistent self-deprecating humour. Is he dead, will i die, am i dead, says the younger brother, because in his eyes, nothing bad has or can or will happen, except losing his phone at the hands of his mother.

The film is good because it shows you the beauty of a country, in its landscapes, in its people, in its song and dance. It reminds me of my love of britain, which for me is one of the most beautiful places in the world, full of friendly people, hilarious jokes, and greenery, as well as a government which i hate. But when i think about britain and talk about britain, i don’t think about and talk about the government. They are a little bit of dirt in the corner of a panorama. They are not my country.

The film is good because of all the little details. In the opening scene, the younger brother plays the films musical motif on a piano drawn on his father’s plaster cast. Mist comes and goes, reminding me of pathetic fallacy for the first time since my english classes in high school, but here it doesn’t feel derivative. The father asks a villager for a light, and then presses his cigarette to the hot coal between tongs held up for him. Everything that gets said gets referenced half an hour later. There are no loose ends that need to be tied up. The film is good.

So in conclusion: everyone should watch this film, first of all because it is a really good film regardless of the country from which it originated, and second of all because it is a really good film because of the film from which it originated. I learnt a lot watching this film and i had a good time. The humour and the cinematography are on point. The acting is excellent. It’s a really thoughtful piece of media.