Hit the Road
Directed by Panar Panahi
Running time: 1hr33 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Rayan Sarlak in Hit the Road
Road movies, more than most genres, hinge on how immediately engaging their characters are. If you’re asking a viewer to essentially place themselves in a confined car for the bulk of a film’s running time, the companions had better be worth the journey — be they as warmly sympathetic as Thelma and Louise or as intriguing as the drifting, taciturn souls of Paris, Texas. From the get-go, Panar Panahi’s infectious debut feature Hit the Road goes all in on lovable relatability: Affectionate but put-upon, eccentric but easily recognisable, its misfit family journeying across northern Iran for reasons unknown have instant, easy comic chemistry and credibility. There’s an officious but loving mother (Pantea Panahiha) holding this spiralling clan together; her sweetly shaggy husband (Hasan Majuni) confined to the back seat with a broken leg, but still steering the conversation; their quiet, thoughtful elder son (Amin Simiar), tasked with the driving; and his exhausting, irrepressible kid brother (Rayan Sarlak, stealing scene after scene with tearaway energy), who brings the chaos. Plus the family’s ailing dog, likely on her last legs, though nobody much wants to talk about that.
Given that collective, you can see why Hit the Road was rather swiftly dubbed an Iranian Little Miss Sunshine when it premiered at Cannes last year — though the comparison is a superficial one. That archetypical Sundance hit was fuelled by rather strenuous quirk; there’s a more pained, solemn urgency driving this family getaway, though that’s being effortfully concealed from the little one. He accepts the explanation that they’re en route to his big brother’s wedding, but isn’t so naive as to entirely believe it: Any perceptive person can sense the nerves and anxieties that occasionally pause the family’s high spirits, and in turn disrupt Panahi’s rollicking comic setpieces with lapses of landscape-watching melancholy. The emerging truth, resonant in an age of refugee crisis, hits all the harder in light of Panahi’s own family history, and the Iranian government’s ongoing persecution of his filmmaker father Jafar. Still this endearing vehicle, sharp and strange and raucously funny to the last, keeps driving, hoping for something better at the end of the road.
HIT THE ROAD (2021) Written by Panar Panahi | Shot by Amin Jafari | Edited by Ashkan Mehri, Amir Etminan
In cinemas now.