Writer-director Panah Panahi, son of filmmaker Jafar Panahi, comes from an Iranian New Wave tradition that violates the principles of realism in ways that have been easy to foresee. The filmmaking style is married to naturalism, but these films often step outside the realm of fiction to incorporate non-fiction elements, ultimately straddling the line between narrative and documentary. Consider Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up (1990), in which a real man accused of impersonating a famous Iranian filmmaker plays himself in a fictionalised version of the events. Or the elder Panahi’s own recent output, which have included documents like This Is Not a Film (2011), so named to cheekily circumvent his ban from filmmaking by the Iranian government, which find some nebulous space outside the binary of real and fake.

Panah Panahi’s Hit the Road, his directorial debut after serving as editor on his father’s 3 Faces, has that similar tension between the real and the artificial, though it finds its “artificial” in a place seen less often in Iranian films: magical realism. And it uses this technique only sparingly, giving it the power to enhance a moment precisely because we aren’t expecting it, and may even find ourselves ferreting out a realistic explanation for what we’re seeing. To call anything about Hit the Road “artificial,” though, is to undermine its emotional realism, which is one of its strongest elements.

The push-and-pull between real and imaginary is an appropriate place to be, in a film about a family road trip that is one thing to three of its participants and another to its fourth. Mum (Pantea Panahiha) and Dad (Mohammad Hassan Madjooni) have had two children more than a decade apart: Big Brother (Amin Simiar), who seems to be in his early 20s, and Little Brother (Rayan Sarlak), somewhere around ten. They’re driving through the rugged Iranian landscape toward the border with Turkey, but these aren’t the normal conditions for a carefree escapade. Dad’s leg is in a cast, and he’s also got a horrible toothache; his normal jocular self only struggles to get through, and primarily for the benefit of the younger son. His older brother and mother are both stressed out, their interactions brittle. The younger son, though, just enjoys the adventure, sticking his head out the window and singing at the top of his lungs.

What the younger son doesn’t know is that they are depositing his brother at the border, where he will be smuggled out of the country – with none of them ever likely to see him again. When the three older family members are by themselves, they finally betray the decidedly mixed emotions of their situation, which they have come by only with great pains and plenty of recrimination. It’s the right thing to get him out, but it’s akin to a death, since they expect subsequently to be gone from each others’ lives forever. What’ll they tell the younger boy about why his brother is no longer around? He went off and got married, maybe. He’s young, he’ll get over it. For the rest of them, though, this is their fraught last road trip as a family.

There’s not a lot more to this story. The family secretly negotiates logistics with the smugglers. They have minor roadside mishaps. They get out and stretch their legs in the vast and dry landscape. Hit the Road is more about creating a mood of the melancholy of life’s tough decisions, and marinating in that mood for 90 minutes. That said, it is also characterised as a comedy, meaning that a prospective viewer should not expect this emotional journey to feel like a chore.

Part of that is the choice not to reveal exactly what is going on with this family until the film is a fair way into its running time, leaving the viewer in a similar position to the child. Hit the Road is not from the perspective of the younger son, as such, given the decent amount of time he does not appear on screen. However, its general tone is informed by his perspective of naivete and innocence.

The film’s periodic resemblance to a fairy tale is an outgrowth of this younger son’s optimism, his temporary ignorance to the harsh realities of the country in which he lives. If you’ve wondered how the younger Panahi and other prominent Iranian filmmakers, such as Asghar Farhadi, avoid the scrutiny of government censors, it’s by mirroring this sense of naivete. There’s no discussion of why the older son needs to get out of the country; that would be a bridge too far. The censors seem concerned more with explicit than implicit criticism. It’s the delicate dance Jafar Panahi was unwilling to do, leading to his 20-year ban from making movies.

And that allows Panah Panahi to indulge in flights of fancy that remind us what it was once like to be innocent of the ways of the world. There’s a scene near the film’s climax where the younger son and his hobbled father are lying on the ground, looking up at the stars. We know the weight of the world is on Dad’s shoulders, but his son only sees an infinite universe, and infinite possibilities for his own life. The way Panahi depicts this, visually, is one of the lingering images of a film that ultimate stakes its claim to a sense of wonder. One hopes the possibilities are still endless for the son who made this film, just like the son depicted in the film, even if they are not for either of the fathers.

 

Hit the Road opens today in cinemas.