Hit The Road: An Iranian Family Road Trip Movie With A Deft Touch

By Liam Lacey

Rating: A

A road trip movie that refreshes and elevates the genre, Hit The Road follows a squabbling Iranian family on a life-changing journey. Though it would be a stretch to describe the film as the Iranian art cinema’s answer to Little Miss Sunshine, this deft hybrid of crowd-pleasing fun and poetic melancholy comes close.

The film is the debut from Panah Panahi, a filmmaker with one eye to the present and another in the rearview mirror. Panahi is the heir to two of the giants of the Iranian cinema, the son of the persecuted filmmaker, Jafar Panahi (The White Balloon, Crimson Gold, Taxi), and a former student of and assistant director to the late, esteemed Abbas Kiarostami.

There are obvious resonances of the older directors’ works, which are replete with dramas set in cars and child-centred fables of political resistance, but Panahi opens up the genre with a free-wheeling, pop sensibility and a sitcom-like premise.

In the backseat of the mid-sized SUV, we have the grumpy, middle-aged dad (Hasan Majuni) with his broken leg in a plaster cast. The cast, which is wedged between the two front seats, is practically another passenger in the car. Periodically, Dad uses a long wire to scratch between his toes.

There’s a piano keyboard drawn onto the cast and — as the film opens and a piano phrase plays on the soundtrack — as a boy of about six (Rayan Sarlak) pretends to play the keyboard notes on his father’s leg. When he’s not annoying father’s cast, the kid is pinballing around the car. The dad, who tries to swat the kid away, calls him “Monkey 2,” when he’s not using more insulting language.

In the front seat on the passenger side sits grey-haired, dignified Mom (Pantea Panahiha), trying to navigate and keep the peace. As she struggles to maintain a calm, brave front, her face is a constant shifting landscape of sun and cloud. The couple’s sullen 20-year-old son (Amin Simiar) drives, only occasionally speaking.

To make things more complicated, there’s a terminally ill stray dog named Jessy in the luggage compartment of the car. The adults are careful not to tell their kid how sick the dog is. They also avoid speaking directly about the purpose of their journey, a journey that will fracture the family, for fear the boy might say too much to the wrong people.

From the start, Monkey 2 is exasperatingly precocious and hyperactive. As the film starts, his parents are worried that he seems to have taken along a cell phone. They discover the kid has hidden it in his pants. Though he insists he has to take some “important phone calls” they take the phone away from him, destroy the SIM card and bury the phone under a rock by the roadside to be retrieved later. The mother is concerned that “We’re being followed.”

Some though not all of the elements of the family’s backstory gradually fall into place. They’ve sold their house and they’re driving a borrowed car and making the thousand-kilometer journey from Tehran through the desert and mountains toward the Turkish border. Along the way, there are strange assignations and changes of direction and by the end, they’ll be on a dirt road amidst migrants in roadside tents.

If the journey is a sombre one, the kid ensures that it is never dull. At one point, a peloton of cyclists flashes by. Monkey 2 distracts one of the riders, so much that the man slams into the side of their car and injures his leg. The family ends up giving him a lift, although Dad spends most of the time mocking the man, who idolizes the irrepressible optimism of Lance Armstrong. “Dishonest prick,” grumbles the father.

As the journey progresses, Panahi deftly alters the mood and point of view from scene to scene, widening the perspective from the confines of the car to the surrounding landscape. As they come closer to their destination, the mother’s forced positivity begins to falter, occasionally breaking into flashes of resentment and anger.

In a long scene by a riverbank, the crusty Dad reveals an almost tender side to his eldest son with this maladroit expression of paternal love. “Whenever you see a cockroach, remember that his parents sent him out into the world with lots of hope.”

As the journey heads through mist-shrouded mountains, the trek takes on an increasingly dreamlike quality. The compositions become more unconventional including extreme wide shots, and even a brief moment of magic realism.

When Dad and Monkey 2 are lying on the grass in their silver mylar blankets, pinpoints of stars surround them and suddenly seem to appear as astronauts floating in a field of stars. In more down-to-earth moments, the action breaks into outbursts of car karaoke, as Monkey 2 — his head through the sunroof with the wind in his hair — yells along to an Iranian pop songs, reveling in the pure mad freedom of the moment.

Hit The Road. Directed and written by Panah Panahi. Starring Hasan Majuni, Pantea Panahiha, Rayan Sarlak, and Amin Simiar. Opens in theatres nationwide April 21.