Hit the Road (2021)

A family affair in more ways than one.

A grassy hilltop. The mountainous distance. Some windswept trees. Sky of dusky periwinkle, clouds illuminated from behind by a sun that’s on its way out. A landscape.

This shot, from Iranian director Panah Panahi’s newly released family road trip movie, Hit the Road, is a beautiful frame, and it’s not even the most beautiful in this film. Or, at least, its beauty is subdued in a way that other moments are not: right before this scene, for example, two characters sit on the edge of a rocky river, grand and craggy canyon walls looming behind them. Right after this scene, a mother and son stare at a purple-gold-silver galaxy smeared across the night sky. This movie is doing a lot of things, which I’ll get into in a sec here, but visually speaking, it’s gazing at the rural, rugged, sweeping Iranian countryside with a serious reverence.

(Note: I’m trying to keep spoilers to a minimum, and the plot is so spare there really isn’t much to spoil, but if you don’t want to know anything at all then maybe stop here and watch the movie first. It’s so good. You’ll like it.)

The film follows a family of four—the mother, the father, the older son, and the younger son—as they drive and talk and dance and lip sync to some extremely good Persian jams on the radio. We know very little about this family from the start (not even their names) and learn not much more as we go, though by the end there is just enough information to understand the circumstances, tone, and gravity of this family road trip, which is pretty clear from the start is not a typical vacation.

Partway through the film we understand that the older son is being taken to Iran’s border with Turkey, where he will be smuggled out of the country, presumably never to return. There is some mention of his bail, which the family put up their home to pay for. We don’t know the son’s crime or how his parents feel about it, and we don’t know quite enough to have a sense of whether this plan to send him to relative safety might work out.

It’s not that the specifics aren’t important here, but what happens when these details are stripped away is that the viewer is left only with the emotional contours that the characters, their personalities, and relationships produce. What I was overwhelmed by as I watched this film was that feeling of goodbye. We might not know exactly what happened to these people in the recent past, but we know they are a family saying goodbye to one of their own, and they don’t appear to believe they’ll see each other again.

So back to the frame. In a film that is essentially one long, heart-rending farewell, this special attention to landscape feels all the more poignant to me. The Iranian countryside is not a place I’m familiar with, and as this family lives in Tehran it appears they’ve probably not spent much time bopping around the Turkish border either. This road trip has them all out of their element (except perhaps the gregarious younger son, whose performance is so joyous and goofy and perfect I’d need to dedicate another post to describing it, so I’ll leave off here.).

So it’s not as if the film shows us a man saying goodbye to the streets and structures he’s known and loved—it’s not that kind of farewell. It’s more like suddenly seeing a new side of a place or a person you know you’re leaving behind forever, and your heart breaks in an unexpected way, because how could you have missed it before? How could you have missed every single chance to see this beautiful thing? And are there really going to be no more chances?

Maybe by now you’re thinking, but Rachel, you could have picked any beautiful landscape shot to illustrate this relatively simple point. Why did you choose this one, which you’ve already said is not even the most remarkable? Great question! I’m afraid I rather buried the lede here, but it’s because I wanted to talk about this film on its own terms before I tell you how Panah Panahi’s father is Jafar Panahi, giant of Iranian cinema whose politically oriented films have made him an enemy of the state.

Since 2010 he’s been placed under house arrest in Tehran, banned from making films (which didn’t stop him, considering the existence of his 2012 film This is Not a Film, which he made at home and had smuggled out of the country), and was just this July arrested once again as part of a sweeping crackdown against artists and filmmakers critical of the Iranian government. So like, a lot to live up to for Panah, you know?

I’ve only seen one of Jafar Panahi’s films, The Mirror (1997), which I watched earlier this year and freaking loved. It begins as the story of a cute little girl with a high, squeaky voice (reminiscent of Panah Panahi’s younger son character in Hit the Road) whose mother fails to pick her up after school, and who gets lost trying to go home on her own. It soon takes on a fun metanarrative twist which I won’t spoil too much here, but suffice it to say that it makes really interesting use of the disconnection between cameras and microphones.

For long swaths of The Mirror, the cameras cannot access a character who is nevertheless still wearing her microphone, so that the viewer sees one thing while hearing something totally different. It's this playfulness with sound which I locked onto immediately while watching the frame in question, and which is why I picked this particular landscape shot out of so many.

For the duration of the scene from which I snagged this frame, the camera stays stationary at a great distance from the characters, who appear as little silhouettes against the dusky sky. We hear them clearly, though, as the mother runs anxiously back and forth between the man on the motorcycle waiting to take her older son away, and the car the family drove here in, because she keeps forgetting things the son might need on his journey. We hear her mutter and pant in real time as she runs from the bike to the car and back, twice, clearly desperate to steal a few more seconds of a life in which her son is still somewhat hers. We also hear the father try to soothe the younger son, who doesn’t understand what’s happening and screams questions over and over, all of which go unanswered.

It’s a scene of great sonic chaos and emotion, whose visuals are almost the opposite, with the peaceful view of the trees and the mountains beyond. It reminded me immediately of how Jafar Panahi father used this juxtaposition between what we see and what we hear in The Mirror. It’s a tool so unique to movies, and which both Panahis use to great effect. Don’t get me wrong—in so many other ways Hit the Road proves that Panah Panahi has his own totally unique visual and sonic voice, but this particular overlap between father and son was just so perfect I had to linger on it.

In a movie about a family separated by some aspect of Iranian law, created by a son whose father’s freedom has been restricted by that same body of law, this creative nod between generations is a powerful thing. I’m reminded of something I heard some author discuss on a podcast a little while back (sorry, can’t remember who or which podcast but will update if I figure it out lol) about using stories to explore the things we fear most, as a way to sap these fears of their strength or even to ward them off. The author had written a story about a little boy on a bicycle getting hit by a car, because she was afraid of that happening to her own son. Apparently it made her feel better. Or, at least, less afraid.

Understanding Panah Panahi’s own family history makes me hope that somehow, through the process of making Hit the Road, he achieved a release from some of the very real and scary things that happen in this stupidly beautiful world.