NYFF 59 Review: Panah Panahi Synthesizes Both Familial Drama and Comedic Levity in ‘Hit the Road’
“Do you ever think about the future?
“The future? I’m already drowning in it.”
The circumstantial conflict of Panah Panahi’s debut feature film, Hit the Road, is something of a secret. Out the gate, you don’t know why a family of four is going on a cross country road trip, but you get the sense that what drives them is urgent. The older son drives, saying what is minimally required of him. Father and younger brother spar jokingly in the back seat with a witty war of words. And the mother makes the most of the situation in the passenger seat by putting on a best face in spite of the looming knowledge that, at the end of this trip, her older son will not be coming home.
Such an emotional separation gives Hit the Road an easy inroad for the conventional family drama. But instead of giving in to those temptations, Panahi carries the majority of his film with the levity of a road comedy. This association comes with its own baggage, but it should be duly noted that this film distances itself from the popular connotations of the genre. No, this is no National Lampoon’s Family Vacation. Rather, this is, to its benefit, a film with much more verbal wit and comedic bite than its American counterparts.
As one might expect, a cross country road trip to the rural mountains of Iran is met with hours upon hours of travel with nothing but the company of each other. The humorous dialog that ensues is what makes Hit the Road so delightful, particularly from Hassan Madjooni and Rayan Sarlak, who play the matter-of-fact father and the charismatic younger son respectively and provide much of the film’s absurdist banter, acting as equal counterpoints of the annoyed and annoyance.
This strongly developed, usefully employed humorous element comes in opposite to the family drama. By withholding the specific circumstances with which our narrative sets forth, Panahi is able to focus on the interpersonal relationships within the family, ditching potentially weightier political and social themes for something more personal. Dialog is not relegated to causality. Instead, we hear direct dialog from one family member to another discussing another off screen.
One instance sees the two boys play off in the distance while the mother expresses to her husband her maternal concern about what and where the older son may go and how the younger son will grow up in his absence. Another instance along a river sees the father having a heart to heart with his older son about the sentiments he should convey to his mother in her presence, especially in such a sensitive time when his words cut deep beneath the surface. These moments are almost always tempered with humor, but their inclusion makes the film’s emotion tangible, nimbly straddling the line that works to the mutual benefit of the road comedy and family drama.
The film’s finest moment comes right at the end with Panahi synthesizing both bereavement and healing in a moment of bitter levity. As the family presumably returns home, driving straight through an unending desert at high speed, they blast Shahram Shebpareh’s “Deeyar,” kinetically bouncing and dancing despite a recent familial separation. There after, a quick about-face occurs with loss rearing its head once again to the tune of a lip synched rendition of Ebi’s “Shabzadeh.” Somewhere between these poles of emotions — between bereavement and healing, comedy and drama — Panahi concludes with an apt encapsulation of the journey we just went on. A touching coup de grâce for this road trip across Iran.
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