The Sound That Memory Knows
John Merritt - The sound arrives first. A man walks, and his leg announces him—wood against concrete, a rhythm that memory cannot forget. In a repair shop somewhere in Tehran, a mechanic named Vahid lifts his head. His hands stop moving. He knows this sound. He has heard it in darkness, in a cell where sound was the only witness.
This is how A Simple Accident begins: with listening. With the body's involuntary recognition of what the mind had tried to bury.
Jafar Panahi made this film because he had to. Not from ambition. Not from calculation. "I felt compelled," he said at Cannes, where the Palme d'Or was placed in his hands. Behind those words: prison. Behind those words: other men, other stories, other bodies that remembered what they could not forget. When he emerged from detention, he carried them with him. He owed them this testimony. He owed them this witness.
The film moves as memory moves—sideways, uncertain, circling. A car accident, trivial and meaningless. A vehicle brought for repair. And then: that sound. That wooden leg. The mechanic's conviction hardens into action. He kidnaps the man, drugs him, locks him in a van. But certainty wavers. Is this Eghbal? Is this the torturer?
The question spreads like water through the city. Other survivors are summoned. A wedding photographer. Her former partner. A bride on her wedding day—a woman who was imprisoned, who was raped. Each one approaches the van as one approaches an altar or a grave. Each one brings their own wound, their own memory of humiliation inscribed in flesh.
Some had been arrested for politics. Vahid's crime was simpler: he had asked to be paid for his labor. Even this the regime could not tolerate. Even this was sedition.
What does justice look like when it appears suddenly in the back of a van, drugged and defenseless? The survivors stand around this question. Some want blood immediately. Others hesitate. Others refuse altogether. The scene pulses with their uncertainty, their hunger, their disgust at their own hunger.
Then: a phone rings. The kidnapped man's daughter is calling. Vahid answers.
Everything shifts. The camera shifts. The story shifts. What was revenge becomes recognition of another kind. A daughter loves her father. This father. This possible torturer. This man with the wooden leg who may or may not have broken other bodies as his own body was broken.
Panahi films this with the patience of prayer. Long takes. Faces held in frame until they reveal what words cannot say. The streets of Tehran appear—and the women walk unveiled, their hair moving in the light. This is the Iran of "Woman, Life, Freedom," the Iran transformed by women's courage, by their refusal to be erased.
The director made this film in hiding, without permits, without approval, without permission from the authorities who once imprisoned him. He remains, even now, on the margins. He remains in resistance.
The film presents itself as comedy—there is even a scene where security agents produce a pocket card reader to collect their bribe, technology accommodating corruption. The audience smiles. But beneath the smile: the abyss. The moral precipice where survivors stand, looking down at the transformation that awaits them if they choose vengeance. From victim to perpetrator. The distance is shorter than they imagined.
The ending remains open. Panahi does not resolve what cannot be resolved. He does not offer easy catharsis. He offers only this: the image of people choosing, moment by moment, not to abandon their humanity. Choosing, despite everything, to remain human.
This is resistance. Not the resistance of weapons or manifestos, but the resistance of the spirit that refuses to become what hurt it. The resistance of dignity that will not be murdered even when the body is broken.
The wooden leg keeps walking. Its sound echoes. Memory listens.