It Was Just an Accident

Despite its almost apologetic title, the latest feature from Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi bears a highly incendiary load. Not quite a call to arms against the raging of tyranny as much as a film that unflinchingly wrestles with the moral dilemmas this tyranny engenders, It Was Just an Accident finds the long-time dissident against Iran’s Islamist regime working in a more explicit and even openly defiant register compared to his previous works. Having been imprisoned twice and slapped with an ongoing filmmaking ban, Panahi is no stranger to the paranoia he dramatizes so vividly in the film’s setup: a vehicular breakdown prompting family man Rashid (Ebrahim Azizi) to stop by a mechanic whose assistant, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), recognizes him as his captor and torturer. But Rashid, or Eqbal the “Peg Leg,” is, for the most part, contrite if insistent on his innocence, when he isn’t kept comatose and locked up in the back of Vahid’s van. His discovery and detention were accidental; what to do with him is a matter of serious and difficult deliberation.

Equal parts thriller and political drama, It Was Just an Accident potently documents the travails of retributive justice. Its influences may be literary, such as when the hesitation underpinning its extrajudicial process is compared to Beckett’s Godot, and the film’s characters may, to its detractors, be reduced to ideological conduits. Yet Panahi’s urgency and realism shine through his metaphysical terrain of good and evil. When Vahid informs his friend and erstwhile regime victim Salar (Georges Hashemzadeh) about his intention to off Rashid, Salar urges grace while directing the vengeful man towards Shiva (Maryam Afshari), a wedding photographer midway through a shoot with bride Golrokh (Hadis Pakbaten) and groom Ali (Majid Panahi). Both women were personally tortured by the Peg Leg, and both are torn between denying the dredging up of this painful past and determining Rashid’s identity beyond earthly doubt. Shiva’s ex-boyfriend, the impulsive and utterly furious Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr), is also enlisted, making Vahid look positively stoic in comparison and threatening to derail the stab at due process that would arbitrate between righteous killing and wrongful martyrdom.

Neither legality nor even ambiguity, however, informs the film’s crux — and though the hip logorrhea of Anatomy of a Fall might have entranced many, Panahi’s precepts are simpler but consequently more terrifying. On the surface, powerful in its own right, It Was Just an Accident paints a staid if affecting portrait of vigilantism, its fantastical catharsis deflated in the moment of absolute agency. At a deeper and more unnerving level, the contingency of its narrative enterprise provides a radical critique of this agency. The God that Rashid unsuccessfully assuages his young daughter with at the film’s start sets nothing in stone, and His fickleness in precipitating the civilians’ wild goose chase for truth and closure pits both objectives, on occasion, against each other. The open wounds that a reign of terror perpetuates, nonetheless, necessarily remain open: where the film’s penultimate sequence, a confessional tour de force, offers some much-needed reprieve, its chilling final shot might have just foreclosed it indefinitely. Sparse, naked, and blistering, It Was Just an Accident may be Panahi’s most invigorating film yet. — MORRIS YANG

Urchin

Critiquing the directorial efforts of well-known actors is trickier than it seems. For example, it’s impossible to ignore, especially at a festival as prestigious and (increasingly) industrially relevant as Cannes, the added buzz they bring to a film; the expectations of, maybe sadistic hope for, failure and vanity. Among the expectations to which these films are beholden is the revelation of a distinct point of view, and whether or not viewers will be able to tell from which directors, with whom the actor has worked, they’ve drawn inspiration for their own vision.

In the case of Harris Dickinson’s film, Urchin, the influences are numerous and disparate. Among the artistic voices sprinkled over his story about the trials and tribulations of a London rough sleeper, Mike (Frank Dillane), are British Kitchen Sink dramas in the tradition of early Ken Loach and Lindsay Anderson; observers of the American outcast, like Jerry Schatzberg; and the Safdie Brothers. One can’t help but consider these influences as anything but overwhelming for a film that, while competently made and performed, is otherwise rather superficial and anonymous.

When we meet Mike, he has been living on the streets for five years. An early meeting with a good Samaritan, who takes him to get a bite to eat, goes wrong. A stolen watch and thrown punch land Mike back in jail for eight months; but the promise of a fresh start and clean(ish) slate when he’s out are the only upside to this momentary poor decision. From there, his tentative position within the British social services machine, a new job at a cheap hotel restaurant, and in relation to a vaguely articulated drug addiction, expose Mike as a twitching, raw nerve, sensitive to criticism and setback, and quick to act on impulse.

Dickinson’s filmmaking approach is one of long lens shots that put Mike and the other people in his orbit, be they rough sleepers or not, into the context of the city around them. The first half hour is full of what looks like mostly stolen shots, appropriate given the film’s already apparent lineage, but while they occasionally establish Mike as belonging to a larger unofficial society of rough sleepers in London, they fail to meaningfully ground the viewer in his perspective. That distance renders Mike’s impulsive choices not only more frustrating from an objective position, but less emotionally impactful than they could be, and perhaps need to be. An early scene with a fellow rough sleeper and apparent old friend, Nathan (Harris Dickinson, himself), is propelled by a confrontational charge; Mike believes Nathan stole his wallet, but Nathan disputes it, and says Mike owes him money anyways. The argument turns into an all-out brawl, and the onlookers are a mixture of paid background actors and genuinely caught-unaware Londoners gawking at the spectacle of flailing limbs and stretched t-shirts. Because the whole scene is observed from a significant distance, the viewer has no choice but to identify with the confused onlookers and gawk at the young men with them.

A gritty realism dominates most of Urchin’s runtime, but when Dickinson finally makes his camera do something different with unannounced departures from reality, it’s difficult to grasp his intent. While Mike takes a shower in his temporary housing, the camera starts to circle the drain (yes), and takes the viewer down the pipes into a trippy CGI-rendered underworld that at times resembles the depths of space and in others DNA under a microscope. The intent is, once again, largely unclear, though when the camera emerges from this non-place and reveals a mossy rock and tunnel-like cave, at the end of which we see Mike looking out into the light, one can faintly grasp at Dickinson’s attempt at representing Mike’s subconscious.

Urchin is never fully committed to the grit, marginality, or momentous pulse, respectively, of its most obvious influences. There are additional flights of fancy, fueled by Mike’s worsening drug addiction, that remove him from his increasingly grim circumstances; a memory-jolting trip to a performance art show and a hallucination involving a street violinist and a church are among a few that establish Mike’s tether to reality, and regular society, as rapidly weakening. But Dickinson seems unprepared, or unwilling, to express much about the real world beyond the fact that Mike’s life is miserable; unable to draw connections, other than the most cursory, between his decline and the inadequacies of the UK’s social safety net. In a new era of austerity in British society, it’s unfortunate Dickinson doesn’t find a way to let it play a larger role in this film. Dickinson is not yet 29 years old and, like almost all first-time directors, is still finding a point of view, so one wants to afford him grace in this regard. At his best, he’s shown he’s a capable stylist, albeit one lacking a clearly defined purpose in Urchin. — CHRIS CASSINGHAM

Love Letters

Same-sex marriage was legalized in France in 2013, one of many countries to enshrine this right as law in the 2010s as the marriage equality movement reached its zenith. Though some at the time considered the right to marriage the logical end of widespread gay rights activism (at least in the primarily Western countries where laws permitting same-sex marriage did indeed pass), an unequivocal victory marking queer people as social equals, this was, of course, an assimilationist pipe dream. The intense backlash to LGBTQ+ social progress that has continued unabated throughout the 2020s is proof enough of this, but in retrospect, it should have been abundantly clear that full equality for queer people had not been achieved, even in the immediate wake of paradigm-shifting laws that provided new rights and protections.

In her debut feature Love Letters, writer-director Alice Douard focuses on the experiences of queer people in the immediate aftermath of France’s legalization of same-sex marriage — through the form of a light domestic drama. In 2014, a newly married Parisian couple, Céline and Nadia Steyer (Ella Rumpf and Monia Chokri), navigate the byzantine process of having a child through in vitro fertilization when this procedure was not yet legal for lesbian couples in France. (Assisted reproduction for lesbian couples and single women would finally be legalized in France in 2021.) Nadia is pregnant, having conceived via a donor in Denmark, and Céline must legally adopt their child to have parental rights. It is a major administrative burden, requiring 15 letters of support from family and friends who have seen her caring for the child, meaning that the child will likely be close to a year old by the time the adoption process is finally finished. Douard follows Céline as she navigates this process — soliciting commitments from friends with kids to write letters, and struggling to ask this of her semi-estranged mother (Noémie Lvovsky), a concert pianist making a stop in Paris while on tour — as her and Nadia, well into her pregnancy, prepare for their child’s birth.

Douard, who co-wrote the screenplay with Laurette Polmanss, takes a semi-episodic approach to the story, following Céline and Nadia through awkward, lightly amusing visits with friends and family as Nadia’s pregnancy progresses. The film, though pleasantly watchable, feels aimless for long stretches because of this loose structure, but Douard manages to engage the viewer’s full attention as some of the subtle tensions propelling the story come to a head in the third act — namely, the unresolved resentment Céline holds for her mother, Céline and Nadia’s mounting anxiety about raising a child, and the latent homophobia still simmering even in the metropolitan enclave they live in.

Douard noted in an interview that she wanted to keep the tone of Love Letters light: “LGBTQ+ films are commonly — and rightly so — harsh or sad. We wanted a film focused on joy and life.” Douard succeeds in buoying the film with humor and warmth, but as a result, it sometimes feels like she pulls her punches. Céline’s relationship with her mother is consistently fraught, and her marriage becomes knotty as she and Nadia deal with a host of external pressures. Douard, though, eventually provides a humorous or heartwarming release valve for these conflicts without fully resolving them. There is earnest and earned joy at the film’s conclusion, but it still remains that Douard focuses on the story’s gentler aspects to the detriment of fully pursuing the more complex dynamics she establishes.

Despite the film’s shortcomings in narrative structure and development, Douard has still crafted an affecting portrait of how a loving couple navigates a unique historical moment. The film takes a pointed perspective on how the broader advances and setbacks of queer political rights play out in individual families: we see how Céline and Nadia face arbitrary bureaucratic and legal challenges, and the people around them struggle to process the concept of a lesbian couple having a child. Yet the staging of the recent past in Love Letters ultimately suggests a point of view that is optimistic as well as grounded. Douard acknowledges the myriad political and cultural obstacles queer people face in starting a family, but keeps the love Céline and Nadia hold for each other and their child always at the fore. — ROBERT STINNER

Obscure Night

There is no creation without destruction, no light without darkness. When the great colonial powers (great as in imposing, not as in good) of centuries past ventured beyond their native lands to expand their territories and, thus, their wealth and power, they created through destruction. They created new international borders by destroying the fabric of local communities, new, enforced imperial domination by destroying authentic existing cultures, new, grand buildings and monuments at home by destroying the natural resources of the countries they’d invaded and violently subjugated.

Among the most naked modern-day symbols of colonialism are the international territories under the official control of European states, like Melilla, a Spanish city bordering Morocco on the North African coast. Here, French filmmaker Sylvain George shot his previous two documentaries, Obscure Night – Wild Leaves (The Burning Ones) (2022) and Obscure Night – Goodbye Here, Anywhere (2023), centering upon North African migrants living rough in the city, attempting to cross the Mediterranean and enter mainland Europe. Melilla is a fairly humble city, largely lacking in ostentatious colonial splendour; its heritage in this regard is laid most bare in the presence of the Spanish settler population alongside these migrants, only designated as migrants due to Melilla’s enduring colony status.

In the third film in George’s trilogy, Obscure Night – “Ain’t I a Child?”, the passive eye may regard less blatant evidence of Europe’s nasty colonial history — this installment is set in Paris, thousands of miles from Africa, again following a group of young North African migrants on the streets. But the evidence is only less readily apparent; it’s more overt, more imposing, and far uglier for its ostensible beauty. Rather than wandering the simple beachfront streets of Melilla, George’s subjects here gather around the Eiffel Tower or in the Place de la Concorde, surrounded by these lavish fruits of their ancestors’ suffering, splendour erected out of exploitation. They’ve come to Paris seeking a better life, only achievable in Western Europe due to what it created out of the destruction of their home countries. Many of these young migrants are from Algeria, a nation with a still-recent troubled political history with France.

Ironically, a better life is not what awaits these young men — George only follows men and boys across all three of these films, and the phone calls home to families suggest that they’ve made this journey for their families’ sake. Europe is either unprepared or unwilling to bear the increasing influx of refugees and economic migrants from the Global South in the past few decades, the inevitable result of their imperial meddling many decades before. “Ain’t I a Child?” is of a piece with the previous two films in chronicling the poverty and delinquency of its subjects’ lives on European soil — their homes may have been destroyed by Europeans generations ago, the ramifications still felt today, but new homes are not being created for them in Europe, as the continent undergoes a seemingly unstoppable political shift rightward. Run-ins with the French legal system are common — the boys speak of court appearances and stints in prison — and, despite some having intended to stay in France upon arrival, many now seek to travel to Germany, or the Netherlands, or Sweden. They don’t seek to travel to Spain, though, since their journey from Africa took them past that way already, and they risk imprisonment if they return.

Where Wild Leaves focused on adults, and Goodbye Here, Anywhere on young adults and older teens, “Ain’t I a Child?” is about the lives of children — the teens are hardened enough by the difficulties of their lives as to appear as adults, and the younger boys enough that they behave like their older counterparts: tough, embittered, threatening violence on one another upon mere mild provocation. It’s a sad, regretful existence, made more so by the lack of compassion shown to these boys — authorities move them on or arrest them, locals ignore them, the system evidently intends to forget them. George’s eye, however, intimately involved yet resolutely unobtrusive, never editorializes. As in all fly-on-the-wall documentaries, there’s a fascinating tension between what we’re presented as reality and our appreciation of the subjects’ awareness of their being filmed, thus blurring the line separating true reality from what may be a kind of performance from those subjects. But George is an observer first and last, and the inexorable truth of these boys’ reality is that it is an ignominious one. Some of the film’s most affecting imagery is of several boys sleeping on metal grating with no bedding whatsoever — unconscious, they’re incapable of performing at all, and there’s no escaping the plain, simple hardship on display.

The boys live in trash spaces in the sumptuous surroundings of central Paris, hidden behind walls and beneath streets. These are the spaces of destruction caused by the incessant creation in Europe’s maintenance of its ill-gotten affluence, like the trash can in the corner serving as a permanent reminder of the price of keeping up appearances. In their present difficulties, they rarely discuss today, but rather reminisce about yesterday and hope for a better tomorrow. In three films, Sylvain George has charted a physical journey that suggests that such a better tomorrow may be an unlikely one; in reverse, he’s charted a journey through time — the men of Wild Leaves were in no better a future than the boys of “Ain’t I a Child?”, despite their advanced age, just as these boys are in no better a future than those men, despite their location. With so little to lose, they pass time by engaging in destruction of their own, from the insignificant — flashing a lighter flame across their palms — to the severe — one incarcerated boy is described as having mutilated himself — to simply watching the light of a sparkler fizzle out into darkness. This film is full of vibrancy, yet it’s distinctly sombre, and hauntingly beautiful in George’s oily, high contrast black-and-white cinematography.”Ain’t I a Child?” is a poignant conclusion to one of contemporary cinema’s most exceptional projects. — PADAÍ Ó MAOLCHALANN

Meteors

There’s a remarkable kind of alchemy at work in Hubert Charuel’s Meteors, an addiction story that transcends the typically staid strictures of the genre to become something altogether more evocative and wonderful. There are traces of a Dardenne aesthetic here, as well as the woozy, somnambulist nighttime reverie of much modern indie cinema. But there’s a real attention to character, too, not just stylish aesthetics. It’s a deeply humane film, burrowing into the difficulties of living in this specific place in time and finding a reason to keep on going.

Mika (Paul Kircher) and Daniel (Idir Azougli) are best friends and roommates, a couple of 20-somethings closing in on 30 who are floating through life in a haze of booze and hash. They live in Saint-Dizier, in northern France, a dying industrial town with ominous symbols of its collapse hovering everywhere in the form of disused, dilapidated factories and smoke stacks. The modern world has left this place behind, and these men with it. Mika is the more level-headed of the duo, holding down a part-time job at a Burger King and picking up occasional freelance journalism work. Daniel is the wild man, the instigator who loves to get drunk and climb things while concocting harebrained get-rich-quick schemes.

Their (relatively) carefree life of hanging with friends, bowling, and staying up all night comes to a halt when their attempt to steal a prize-winning orange cat goes south, landing them in jail. Mika loses his car and his license, and Daniel has a seizure while appearing in court. A doctor explains to him that it’s the result of alcohol withdrawal, and that if he doesn’t get sober, he’ll drink himself to death in a matter of years. This diagnosis gives the film its dramatic structure, but Charuel provides lots of space for his performers to exist as fully fleshed-out characters rather than simple mouthpieces for anti-drug messaging. A montage of the friends cleaning their apartment while singing a song together, for instance, is exceedingly lovely, a perfect encapsulation of a relationship that is full of energy and camaraderie.

Eventually, inevitably, complications must ensue. At the behest of their lawyer, Mika and Daniel enroll in an outpatient substance abuse program, while also getting more stable work with their friend Tony (Salif Cissé), who runs an under-the-table construction business. Their first assignment is building containment cubicles at a nuclear waste disposal site. Mika dedicates himself fully to sobriety, and while it appears that Daniel is trying to do the same, in reality, he has simply begun to hide his drinking from his friend. Meanwhile, the construction job becomes more dangerous, driving a further wedge between the three pals. Charuel and cinematographer Jacques Girault do remarkable work showing the scale and doldrums of the work site; despite their poverty, the men’s shared living space is mostly warm and cozy, if cramped. By contrast, the waste site is all huge concrete slabs, a vast field of personality-less rebar and steel girders, almost like a Brutalist prison. The film smartly recognizes that while society undoubtedly values the gainfully employed more than stoned layabouts, the work on offer is dehumanizing and alienating.

In this sense, Meteors has something in common with Clément Cogitore’s Sons of Ramses and Virgil Vernier’s Cent Mille Milliards, in that poverty and disenfranchisement are part of marginalized life in the globalized 21st century. Meteors isn’t perfect; there’s a late plot development that feels disingenuous, like the filmmakers felt a need to goose the audience. There’s also a bit of heavy-handed symbolism throughout, although by the end it at least feels more earned than not. Still, small blemishes and all, Charuel’s is largely a remarkable film, a genuine attempt to grapple with life in the present tense, a here-and-now survey with all the contradictions that implies. — DANIEL GORMAN