Mark Reviews Movies: HIT THE ROAD (2022)

Hit the Road, Kino Lorber

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 5, 2022

A family of four is on the road, somewhere in Iran and to somewhere else in that country. The reason is unknown at the start, and the specifics behind the reason for the trip remain unclear throughout Hit the Road. The journey of writer/director Panah Panahi's debut film is far more important than the destination or, for that matter, the starting point.

That journey isn't about what this family is doing, where they're going, or why they're going there in the first place. It's all about them being together for now, while they still can be a whole. This will be the last time the four of them will be one unit for the foreseeable future—or, depending on what that future holds, in general.

How does someone make the best of such a situation? You have to, even though it's impossible to do so. That's both the small joy and inescapable tragedy of this warm, observant, and pointed study of a family doing the only thing they know how to do and can do under the circumstances: be together.

Panahi's story begins as a mystery, and to be clear, it remains one in certain respects, even after the ending credits have finished. There are some things we are not meant to know, because knowing them might get in the way of the filmmaker's actual intentions, adding a layer of the political, the societal, or the cultural atop what's a simple but still a clearly political, social, and cultural critique of this place at this particular moment.

Surely, Panahi probably cannot say as much he wants to about Iran, its government, and any specific policy, law, or reactions to those things. For some context, he is the son of filmmaker Jafar Panahi, whose own films have gotten in trouble with the authoritarian government, leading to a multi-year ban from filmmaking (although he has found some clever ways around that restriction).

Obviously, this is irrelevant to the son's film, which stands on its own and removed from the father's legal issues, but in another way, the film and its content clearly has been influenced by the knowledge of how far institutional critique can go in Iran. The existence of this story, which simply acknowledges that some people aren't happy with the state of the country and have a reason to flee it, seems to be extent of capacity for critique. Let's see, though, if the son's gamble works in his favor—or, at least, doesn't work against him.

The story is a road trip, featuring a frowny father (Hasan Majuni), a glowing mother (Pantea Panahiha), and the couple's two sons. The young son (Rayan Sarlak) is a bundle of seemingly endless energy, but the kid's big brother (Amin Simiar) is quiet in contemplation, moodiness, or both. In the way-back of the family's station wagon, there's an adorable dog, which the parents have to carry out of and into the car. Save for a guest or two and the people they meet along the way, this family is the full extent of the characters here.

We don't learn much about their individual histories, except that the father broke his leg about four months ago and is still in a cast, that the younger son has a girlfriend he wants to call, and that the mother is suspicious of her husband's leg and worried about what will become of the family. We definitely don't learn why they're leaving their home, except that the older son got into legal trouble, the parents had to sell their house and their car (This one is borrowed) to pay his bail, and the trip has the goal of getting this "traveler" to a place where he can cross the border into Turkey.

The reason is immaterial and unrevealed, since the fact of the older son's self-imposed exile from his homeland is statement enough—in terms of both Panahi making a political point and the filmmaker saying as much in that regard as he's comfortable of saying. For a while in this tale, the reason for the trip and the journey itself are just an excuse, anyway. We're watching this family, not to learn what the son did or didn't do (and almost certainly shouldn't have been arrested for, given the tone and stakes of this plot), but to see them as the flawed, irritable (and sometimes irritating), short, anxious, moody, melancholy, wounded, fearful, uncertain, and, above all else, lovingly decent people they are.

Panahi's screenplay and these performances create these characters and this particular familial dynamic with specific but universally relatable authenticity. There's the father, who always seems to be grumpy or annoyed with whatever or whomever is in front of him at the moment and who has resigned himself—but not enough to fail to point it out—to having his good advice go ignored.

Meanwhile, he cares enough about his family to make a game of his annoyance, to keep offering that advice, and to try to prevent them from experiencing more pain than life has already thrown at them. The dog, for example, is ill with a deadly infection, and while he was supposed to bring it to the veterinarian to have it put down, he didn't have the heart to do so. Now, he has to keep up the illusion that the pup is fine, lest it break his younger son's heart.

The mother's heart is breaking, knowing that her older son is going away for an unknown amount of time and that the remaining family's prospects are as bad as they have ever been. What else, though, is an adoring mother to do but to smile, lip-sync along with the radio, reminiscence with affection about the son's childhood, and only cry with her eyes averted to heavens, when she knows no one is watching. In a film filled with so many small but potent gestures, the ones that go unseen by others, such as the mother's tears or the father's adoring stare at his wife while he sings a love song under his breath, are the ones that so deeply connect us to these characters.

The connections are the point of Hit the Road, as its story moves toward the series of inevitabilities Panahi has established. One is the son's destination. Another is the dog's fate. The big one is that this journey doesn't end, even after the family's current mission is finished. It goes on and on and, as long as it's possible, together, thankfully.

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