Hit the Road

If films really are a machine for empathy, as Roger Ebert once said, then that would surely apply to the film Hit the Road from Iran written and directed by Panah Panahi, a road movie that will show many audience members that their chaotic, argumentative, sometimes fraught road trips involving fighting parents, annoying children, and a sick dog might be universal facts of life in any country. 

What kind of a road trip is it? It's a little more complicated that the average family vacation. Some viewers might find this brilliant, while others may find it frustrating, but Hit the Road is incredibly patient, particularly in its first thirty minutes. In the opening scenes, a family of four is on a road trip. Everything appears normal, although the parents seem a bit paranoid. The mother (Pantea Panahiha) scolds their mischievous young boy (Rayan Sarlak) for sneaking their father's cell phone on the trip. The boy humorously insists that he requires the phone for important phone calls he's expecting. It's such a big deal, though, that the mother has their older son (Amin Simiar) pull over so she can hide the phone on the side of the road for them to retrieve on their way back. That's a bit peculiar for a family road trip, no? At another point, she whispers that she thinks they're being followed. They are, but it's by another driver who's been trying to tell them that their car is leaking. 

So much of Hit the Road takes place in the family's car on their way to a destination that is never fully explained, certainly not to the young boy, who remains blissfully ignorant about just about everything that is happening, probably because of his constantly high energy, sucking the oxygen out of the car practically every time. 

In or out of the car, the actors are fantastic. It's hard to choose a favorite performance of the four because they all act so terrifically. Simiar as the older brother has a mystery to his acting; he cleverly guards what could be described as enormous internal turmoil that is kept from the viewer for most of the film. Hassan Madjooni, as the indolent father likely wishing to make everything appear perfectly normal, submits an effortless and masterful performance. He sits there, apparently helpless as his leg is broken, muttering a few lines of morbid humor here and there and calling his boys monkeys. Did he fall? Yes, he tells someone, he "fell from grace." He has most of the funny moments in the film. Finally, I'm amazed at how Panahi got such an exceptional performance from such a young performer like Sarlak; maybe Panahi's notes were simple, like "be more annoying," but Sarlak makes it work. His performance is so naturalistic, much more than most of what we typically see in Hollywood productions. His acting here is comparable to Waad Mohammed in Wadjda, Brooklynn Prince in The Florida Project, Jacob Tremblay in Room, and Abigail Breslin in Little Miss Sunshine, which Tomris Laffly drew parallels to. 

And finally, there is probably my favorite performance: Panahiha, the mother. Panahiha demonstrates mastery of a variety of various difficult tasks for an actor. She has to shift from so many different emotional highs and lows, and nothing, it seems, is in her control. "Nothing but lies," she finally lets out, when it's just her, the older boy, and her husband. (The young one has gone to menace passengers on a bus.)  

Panahi is the son of Iranian New Wave director Jafar Panahi, who has continued to be prohibited by the government from making films. You might have seen his documentary from 2011 called This Is Not a Film, which was smuggled out of Iran in a flash drive hidden inside a cake. As already mentioned, the younger Panahi's script (though a little too obsessed with urine) is very patient in revealing what's actually going on, and even then it's not entirely clear, though things do become more and more interesting as it progresses. Some patience is therefore required, but it's worth the ride.