Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 3 September

Hit the Road (Panahi, 2021)

After a fairly dismal weekend with three unexceptional – or worse – films in cinemas, I’m changing my plans for today because I want to celebrate something great that I saw in a theatre last night.

Thanks to the Wellington Film Society, the editor-in-chief and I got to see something exceptional at the Embassy Theatre and it went some way to restoring my enthusiasm.

Hit the Road is a Panahi film but not the Panahi you might expect. Panah Panahi is the son of the great Iranian director Jafar Panahi (Crimson Gold, Offside) and could serve as a companion piece to his father’s recent film No Bears, which played last year’s New Zealand International Film Festival. That film featured the filmmaker, playing himself, attempting to direct a film in Turkey by remote control while he is stuck in a remote Iranian border village, unable (or unwilling) to cross the border.

That border looms over Hit the Road as we follow a family on a trip in a borrowed car. Dad (Hassan Madjooni) is grumbling in the back, broken leg in a cast. Mum (Pantea Panahiha) is anxious in the front passenger seat. Youngest son (Rayan Sarlak) is causing mayhem in the back, especially when the family discovers he has brought a forbidden cellphone with him. Older son (Amin Simiar) is preoccupied in the driver’s seat.

We don’t know where they are going but we can tell that a great deal of effort is going into ensuring that the youngest son doesn’t comprehend how much stress there is in the rest of the car. He seems impervious to it, anyway. Intent on his own bliss.

Hit the Road is a classic road movie, full of incident and incidental characters: a racing cyclist they have to give a ride to after they inadvertently topple him from his machine, a shepherd who sells whole sheep so that travellers can have a fresh sheepskin balaclava for their perilous journey.

It’s the story of a family that demonstrates their love by bickering, and it combines a beautiful appreciation for the tragic absurdities of life with a profound sense of the magic in our midst, magic that tells us that, no matter what happens, we have to carry on.

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Where to watch Hit the Road