In writer/director Panah Panahi’s film, Hit the Road, a small family packs itself into a minivan to travel from a small town in Iran to the Turkish border, in order to fulfill the dreams of one of its children. The parents barely keep it together, the older brother is forbiddingly quiet and meanwhile, there is also a small child whose wisdom beyond his years is almost precocious in how disarming it is. The details are different enough that we can’t accuse Panahi of plagiarism or claim that the film is a remake. That’s simply another way of saying that the filmmaker has created a gem of seriocomedy that nearly matches 2006’s Little Miss Sunshine in overall cumulative effect.
Direct comparisons are almost always cheap, though, and the movie at hand works entirely outside such a context, particularly as a showcase for the performances from the four principal actors playing the members of this family. None of them have names, or, in any case, each of them could simply be named after the actor playing them. Mom (Pantea Panahiha) especially cannot entirely keep her emotions in check as the family draws closer and closer to their destination. Dad (Hassan Madjooni) has a broken leg and a lot to say about the entire situation in which this family finds itself. The elder son (Amin Simiar) is the one with a mission to see through, and the younger child (Rayan Sarlak) doesn’t seem to have been given the full picture of his brother’s wishes – though that doesn’t mean he’s entirely ignorant of the world around him.
The elder son’s mission goes unexplained for so long that it barely matters in the screenplay written by Panahi, who has clearly learned a whole lot from his trailblazing, still-imprisoned filmmaking father Jafar Panahi. What matters much more is the establishment of this family dynamic, which can be politely described as chaotic. Mom loves both of her children and works very hard to keep everyone happy, even as tears quietly pool in her eyes. Dad is bemused by just about everything, and the central disagreement with his elder son’s mission has led to tension between the two. The dialogue here employs a quick wit, and in one moment, the captions provided for English-reading audience members can barely keep up with the back-and-forth pacing of the speakers. It’s thrilling to hear words spoken with such ease and sense of familiarity.
The actors are uniformly superb here, with Panahiha and Madjooni creating a believably strained but essentially loving union, Simiar somewhere between intensity and sincerity and, most impressively, Sarlak getting the most to do as the de facto “protagonist” of the family, in that everything we see is primarily filtered through this young boy’s perspective. Some misadventures occur along the way: An aspiring professional bicycler with just a little too much respect for the disgraced Lance Armstrong catches a ride for some of the way here. Dad discovers an adorable but dying dog on the street and “adopts” it for his younger son to experience a bit of companionship. In the funniest stretch, the arrangements for the elder son are nearly derailed by a lack of specifics on the end of those who have agreed to smuggle him across the border.
Hit the Road is the kind of movie that sneaks up on the viewer. This means that the film’s shifting tones, between the comedy of the family unit and the gut-wrench of their situation, must be nearly perfect to get us through some of that whiplash. The scruffiness of the production (which takes advantage of both the spaciousness of the van and the claustrophobia of four people being in it) is fully endearing.
Photo courtesy of Kino Lorber
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