Iran’s cycle of revenge Its people must learn to forgive

It’s become a running joke on Iranian social media — screen captures of Western headlines regarding previous popular uprisings in the country that read: “This isn’t like previous protests in Iran.” The message is that this latest tumult spells the end of the Islamic Republic. Except those earlier headlines appeared in 1999, 2009, 2017, 2022. The storms of popular discontent raged and then dissipated, but the regime didn’t budge.

We are told that the current uprising, sparked initially by anger over inflation, is different. But contrary to expectations, we’re unlikely to see a spectacular end to the regime in the manner of the ouster of Ceaușescu or the fall of the Berlin Wall — the 1989 moment whose eternal return liberals the world over yearn for. No, there won’t be a spectacular collapse, because the Islamic Republic of Iran has, in a sense, already fallen.

Its Arab proxies are defanged. Its nuclear program is partially buried under President Trump’s bunker busters. Its currency is reaching Zimbabwean levels. And it has largely given up enforcing its hijab and other Shiite morality norms in many urban centers. A much more likely ending is one in which more nationalist elements within the current regime take over, with or without a little push by outside powers.

What persists, for now, is a ghost regime: a sad remnant of the last of the great modern revolutions that, like some apparition in a haunted house, is condemned to remain at the scene of its own demise, faintly repeating the slogans of its former vitality, wondering if anyone still cares. Death to Israel! Death to the enemies of the jurisconsult! Death to the Great Satan!

The Islamic Republic clamored so much for death, sweet and glorious death, it lost sight of the basics of life: bread, water, electricity. . . . Ghosts don’t need such things, but people do. Especially people who look around at the likes of Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia, and behold gleaming prosperity, rising living standards, normality. Their own lot, meanwhile, is defined by diminished expectations, massive graft, and life and treasure wasted on building an arc of “resistance” against the Jewish state that was destroyed in a matter of months.

Against this haunted backdrop, it’s up to the Iranian people to decide, now, how they want to live together, and with their region and the world. Will they forgive each other? Or repeat the cycle of totalizing politics, repression, and revenge that brought them to their current nadir in the first place? As it happens, Iran’s greatest living director, Jafar Panahi, addresses these questions in his latest film, It Was Just an Accident, which hit the screen in major cities just as the latest unrest began.

A taut thriller in the style of Jean-Pierre Melville, the film tells the story of Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri in a quietly stunning performance), a worker who happens upon, and kidnaps, Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), the intelligence officer who’d tortured him when Vahid joined a labor strike over unpaid wages.

Vahid is about to bury Eghbal in the middle of the desert when he’s gripped by doubt. The real Eghbal had lost a leg fighting in the Syrian Civil War. But the man in the shallow grave insists that his prosthetic leg — whose squeaking sound led Vahid to believe he’d found his erstwhile torturer — is a recent addition. What if he’s got the wrong man? What if he’s about to murder an innocent? This simple doubt becomes the driving force of the film’s plot.

Vahid reunites with a fellow prisoner — Salar, a dissident intellectual — who urges him to free Eghbal, or whoever he is. “This business doesn’t have an ending,” Salar warns Vahid. This could mean that Vahid could face real-world consequences. But it also suggests that the blood in Iran will never run dry if people continually seek revenge. Vahid isn’t convinced. He’s lost everything to the regime Eghbal represents, and he’s bent on making him pay.

Salar refuses to help directly, but he introduces Vahid to a photographer, Shiva, who was also imprisoned for her political activities and tortured by Eghbal. Other former prisoners soon join the group. One of them, Hamid (Mohammad Ali Elyasmehr), instantly identifies the man in Vahid’s van as their torturer (by his smell) and thrills at the thought of inflicting suffering and death upon Eghbal.

Others are more hesitant, partly out of the same doubt that initially stays Vahid’s hand, but partly over deeper qualms: Will torturing and murdering a killer improve anything? No, Shiva and others begin to think. But Hamid is adamant, and it’s notable that while the rest of them are professional-class types who’ve landed on their feet, he’s been less fortunate (and, the film suggests, he was something of a loser even before his prison stint).

Thus unfolds the unlikely moral and philosophical debate folded into the film’s thriller script — a debate that confronts many ordinary Iranians opposed to the Islamic regime. Panahi, to his credit, gives Hamid a decent chance to make his case: to wit, the fanatics who run the Islamic Republic have no regard for the lives they ruin, and anything short of a willingness to act politically — in the Schmittian, friend-enemy sense of the term — is just playing around.

But in the end, the other side “wins” the debate. The kidnapped man’s phone rings. It’s his daughter, crying for her father to come home because her pregnant mother is unresponsive. The gang treks over to his house and drives mother and child to the hospital, where the baby is safely delivered. The group even pools cash to tip the nurses, as custom demands.

Only afterward is it revealed that — spoiler alert — the man in the van really is the torturer who’d subjected them to dozens of mock executions; who’d beaten Vahid so badly, he’s developed kidney problems; who threatened to rape the women before killing them (since, under Shariah law, virgins go straight to paradise).

I won’t spoil more of the plot. What matters is that the Hamid temptation — let us torture the former torturers, execute the executioners — is all too real, and it can derail whatever comes next into another national dead-end. No foreign intervention and no Trumpian Delta Force can save Iran from that outcome. It is up to Iranians themselves to forgive each other, and finally permit the blood to run dry.

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