Mom is singing along to the car radio, whilst Dad (Khosro) and his boisterous younger son are dancing along in the back seat. Dad’s leg is broken, his cast a collage of the son’s drawings and doodles. The elder brother and driver, Farid, solemnly casts his gaze toward the open road.
Echoing modern Iranian masterpieces such as Kiarostami’s Ten and his father, Jafar Panahi’s, Taxi Tehran, Panah Panahi’s debut feature Hit the Road confines itself almost entirely to the confines of a well-traveled family car as it journeys onward through the Iranian countryside. Beginning in media res with the family’s intentions for traveling left unspecified, we are left to piece together the details of what might be their last hours together.
The automobile setting is (excuse the pun) literally the perfect vehicle for a family drama of this type; with no separate room to retreat to, no bedroom door to slam and create privacy behind, the car provides an at times uncomfortable intimacy where removing oneself from the emotion of family life is practically impossible.
And yet cinematographer Amin Jafari’s camera, his lingering shots of Khosro staring off into the distance or capturing the pained tears of both Pantea Panahiha’s (unnamed) mother and Farid, make tangible the emotional reality of what is largely being left unspoken. Panahi’s script offers hints and tidbits: misleads such as the ill health of the family dog Jessy who pants away in the back of the 4×4 whilst the younger son remains blissfully unaware of his furry friend’s plight. But with only a handful of minor characters beyond the family and a mostly desolate landscape beyond the car’s windows, Hit the Road asks us to concentrate first and foremost upon the subtext of the family’s conversations as they joke, sing, reflect and complain together.
Ultimately, Panahi reveals that rather than a journey toward some known destination, his film’s family unit, or at least one particular member, is fleeing from the life they had been living. Details are left sketchy and uncertain, but the writer-director’s empathetic script and the believability of the family dynamic he portrays on screen shifts focus toward the larger emotional ramifications of its fragmentation rather than the specifics of its genesis.
Like the work of his father, Panahi’s film is profoundly human, whilst also offering comparatively idiosyncratic moments of cinematic poetry and stylisation that often ironically complement its primarily naturalistic, near-neorealist, approach to storytelling. Ultimately, it is a film about family, and the lengths we will go to to protect the ones we love.
Notes from the Multiplex 