Hit the Road

Iranian filmmaker Panah Panahi’s debut feature is kind of a miracle. Not just because it was shot under a regime so strict that Panahi’s own father, acclaimed director Jafar Panahi, has been legally forbidden from practising his craft while his sister, Solmaz Panahi, was forced to flee the country after starring in one of their father’s films. But because it somehow manages to translate this anxiety into a film that moves with the lightness of a road trip flick.

Hit the Road is about a family of four who are making their way to the border where they have made arrangements to have their eldest son smuggled across. Naturally, their journey is marked by moments of intense fear, all four hearts skipping a beat any time another car lingers behind them too long. But for the most part, their rented vehicle acts as a safe haven, sealed off from the state’s suffocating influence.

Inside it, they blare pre-revolution pop hits from the radio and sing along at the top of their lungs. They draw on the windows with marker pens and snack on pistachios. They tease each other, dance together, argue and laugh. Rolling along the road in this bubble of privacy, they get to be funny, grumpy, petty and joyful. They get to be themselves, fully and fearlessly.

And it’s impossible not to get swept up into that effervescent family atmosphere because each of the four figures is so perfectly drawn. Dad (Hassan Madjooni) sits in the back with a busted leg, delivering punchlines in an earthy monotone. Mum (Pantea Panahiha) seems like she might be relegated to the role of worried caretaker only to bust out a devilish grin and a wicked one-liner. The younger son (Rayan Sarlak) is a total livewire – playing, pranking and arguing with the boundless confidence and absolute self-seriousness of a well-loved child. And then there’s the older son (Amin Simiar), keeping his own counsel in the driver’s seat while life as he knows it recedes slowly into the rear-view mirror.

They create a whole world within the confines of that Mazda station wagon. You can feel their full history together in each exasperated sigh and pointed comment. These are people who have known each other or been known to each other for their entire lives, and it shows. And that lends the film its tragic undercurrent too. Because, for all of the cavorting and karaoke-ing, the knowledge of how this journey ends and why it was necessary always hangs in the air. But though the destination is inevitable, Panahi keeps finding avenues of escape – from the familial freedom found inside the car to an enchanting sequence in which father and son lay on the ground together and look up at the stars as they are slowly absorbed into the cosmos.

Hit the Road is elegant, elegiac and defiantly open-hearted. It's never saccharine, just shot through with a love for its characters that refuses to be entirely quelled by the hardships imposed upon them.

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Released 29 Jul by Picturehouse Entertainment; certificate 12A