Rent Hit the Road (2021)

Freedom is a small boy flying out of a car's sunshine roof . . . - Hit the Road review by Jed

In a world where all the intimacies of life are refused

by the mullah censors, the only space still free to sing

out loud or even (shock! Horror!) let a woman's hair fly

(just a little) free - is the motor car. Your own private world.

This film in a most subtle way lets you understand what

living like that means with true freedom expressed by one

of the most wonderful small boy actors (Ryan Sariak)

I think I have ever seen.

Freedom is a small boy flying out of a car's sunshine roof . . .

Very impressive tender dark comedy - Hit the Road review by PD

This highly original, wonderfully acted and beautifully shot film from Panah Panahi (son of Jafar Panahi) is set amid the winding desert highways and emerald valleys of northwestern Iran - the format being that of a family road trip, albeit one fuelled by the growing suspicion that its characters have taken a major detour away from our normal mortal coil at some point along the way. 'Where are we?' a grey-haired mother (a very delicate, bittersweet Pantea Panahiha) asks into the camera upon waking up from a restless catnap inside the SUV in which so much of this film takes place. 'We’re dead,' squeaks the youngest of her two sons (the superb Rayan Sarlak) from the back seat, a wonderfully annoying 6-year-old who never stops talking and moving restlessly throughout the film. They aren’t dead — at least not literally, even if the adorable dog who’s been brought along for the ride seems to be on its last legs — but the further Panahi’s foursome drives away from the lives they’ve left behind in Tehran, the more it begins to seem as if they’ve left behind life itself. A purgatorial fog rolls in as they climb towards the Turkish border, and with it comes a series of semi-competent guides (one amusingly trying to steer a motorbike from behind a sheepskin balaclava).

We never know why Khosro (tenderly played by Hassan Madjooni) and his wife so urgently fled their home in order to smuggle 20-year-old Farid (a truly tortured Amin Simiar) out of the country and away from the autocratic government their introverted first-born must have offended somehow, but it’s clear that this family is speeding down a one-way street. 'We lost our house and we sold our car for him to be able to leave,' one parent cries to the other. 'Do you ever think of the future?' And yet it’s the past that’s being forfeited to pay for it. Later, the little boy will take stock of the situation and ask his dad if they’re cockroaches. 'We are now,' Khosro grunts in response, most of his attention focused on the metal wire he’s using to scratch at the toes sticking out of his leg cast. So it goes in a beautifully tender dark comedy that swerves between tragedy and gallows humour with some skill, and knowingly sabotages all of its most crushing moments with a deadpan joke in order to keep Khosro’s family from running out of gas. It's a story about people who have to laugh in order to stop themselves from crying, and Panahi commits to that dynamic with the unwavering dedication of someone who knows that his characters don’t have any other choice. Very impressive work indeed.

Contrived and dull - Hit the Road review by SG

I didn’t have the same reaction as the other reviewers. I suspect that such praise will only send the message that this is the kind of film that western audiences love: slow, without character development, deliberately uneventful and lacking a coherent story element.

“I know, let’s put in some poignant Bach and Schubert. They love to thinking how sad and repressed we are all the time. And why not have a dog in it, they’ll love that too. Let’s make it get sick and die. Show some nice landscape and they’ll go on about the cinematography and gloss over the obvious failings.”