Panah Panahi’s Hit the Road (Jadde Khaki) is a road trip movie unlike any other ever seen before. His directorial debut focuses on a family traveling alongside the borders of Iran and shows beautiful landscapes from the desert roads to the greener, mountainous side. Panahi is the son of acclaimed Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who championed against the government and was sentenced to a six-year house arrest and a 20-year ban from filmmaking. In some ways, Hit the Road feels like a response to his father’s sentence and how his family was impacted by it. Panahi’s directorial debut is an emotional journey that shows the impending separation of a family and how they deal with it, and it is a reflection of his own family gaining strength and freedom.
The film begins on the side of a highway inside an SUV, where a sleepy father (Hassan Madjooni), his wife (Pantea Panahiha), and their boisterous six-year-old son (Rayan Sarlak) mimic notes on a hand-drawn piano on his father’s massive leg cast. Their eldest son (Amin Simiar) waits anxiously outside their vehicle and returns back, but says nothing and drives them to an unknown destination near the Turkish border. The family’s terminally ill dog sits at the back of the SUV, but he doesn’t have much time left. Throughout the road trip, they are on edge. They constantly watch their backs to check if someone is following them and turn their phones off to make sure they aren’t being tracked. They spend hours in the car, fiddling with the radio, chanting a song, pit stops are made, and unexpected encounters, and all through this, this small family and their dog deal with an eventual and devastating reality that ends their journey altogether.
An issue with Hit the Road would be its lack of exposition. Panahi doesn’t explain to the audience why this family is fleeing or where they are heading. Every little detail is revealed as the story progresses forward. Perhaps that’s the point and Panahi’s intention is not to reveal, but rather show the connection between family and the revelations they seek as they drive down the desert roads and green mountains. Even when the family reaches the end of their journey, the audience still doesn’t know where the eldest son is heading.
Despite the lack of context, the audience is aware that they are in a precarious situation. In one scene, when the mother realises that someone is following her, she asks her eldest son to make a pit stop near a remote store. While they are waiting, the mother and eldest son have a heart-to-heart and at the end she gets quite emotional, but her son brushes it off. Panahi works to shift the movie’s emotions from happiness to sadness with swiftness. He wants the audience to understand the family, especially the mother’s grievance about letting her eldest son leave, and even if the audience doesn’t know all the details, it doesn’t matter. What is important is the family’s bittersweet road trip, which is filled with gags and shenanigans, is one only Panahi can capture within the limited space of the car.
When the family gets tangled in the middle of a bike marathon, the eldest son runs into a biker. The rest of the family tells him to drive along, but the son is unable to leave him stranded and injured, so the biker hitches a ride with them for a few miles. The biker expresses his admiration for Lance Armstrong and the father tells the stranger that he is a cheat, even when the biker tries to defend his hero, as the other cyclists pass along them. Moments later, the eldest son drops him off at the head of the race, and it’s the small gags such as this that make Panahi’s movie wholesome and heartwarming. It leaves the audience to look at the happy moments between the family before the foreboding realities of the journey get closer to them.
Amin Jafari’s cinematography is splendid and gorgeous. In one scene at the end of the movie, when the family is waiting for their eldest son to be picked up by bikers to drop him off at an undisclosed location, the entire scene is a wide shot. The characters are silhouettes and the camera pans and zooms in to focus on the running to collect themselves before saying goodbye to their eldest son. The audience only hears the characters calling out to each other and their faces are never visible. The entire shot is filled with a green landscape and the setting sun, which incorporates into the emotions of the characters, too.
Perhaps one of the best performances of the entire movie is Sarlak, who plays the effervescent and boisterous son. He is explosive and energetic, and clearly knows how to rattle his parents with his shenanigans but even then, Panahi balances it out with his innocence. In a scene completely different from the rest of the movie, the father and the young son are laying on the ground inside a foil sleeping bag and they are transported into space. It is a surreal moment and shows how the young son is unaware of the grimmer realities of his brother’s journey.
Panahi uses his voice to pivot between the sadness and joy of a wonderfully bittersweet road trip in Hit the Road. “Who can hear the pain of my broken heart?” The mother sings as she drives in their SUV after dropping her eldest son off somewhere. The mother tries to make sense of her new reality without her eldest son, and it’s cathartic. Perhaps the lack of exposition works in favour of it all. Maybe keeping the audience in the dark about these unanswered questions and focusing on the road trip and their family bond is Panahi’s aim. The rawness and the expressions captured in Hit the Road make the journey even more special, and when the youngest family member sticks his head through the sunroof and blissfully yells the chorus of the song, everything comes together.
