Rayan Sarlak is the scene-stealer of the year, a force of personality so exuberant and endearing that Hit the Road can barely contain him—not that it would want to under any circumstances. A pint-sized motormouth who can’t stop asking questions, crawling about the backseat of his family’s SUV (and the father who shares it with him), and running around with reckless abandon, his voice as loud as his growls are spontaneous, he’s a whirlwind of motion, sound and energy, and exactly the sort of rambunctious spirit that belongs on the expansive silver screen. It’s no surprise that, when he’s introduced pretend-playing a keyboard drawn on his father’s leg cast, we can hear the twinkling notes. The kid is magic.
Fortunately, as great as Sarlak is, he’s not the only laudable aspect of Hit the Road, a spartan and oblique road-trip drama from Iranian writer/director Panah Panahi that, after showings at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and New York Film Festival, premieres in New York theaters on April 22, with a national rollout to follow. Panahi is the son of acclaimed filmmaker Jafar Panahi (Crimson Gold, This is Not a Film), whose decade-long battle against the Iranian government has forced him to make movies on the sly and prevented him from leaving his homeland, and his feature debut feels attuned to his family’s arduous situation, tapping into a sense of alienation, dislocation and separation that they all undoubtedly know well. There’s both humor and heartache in this saga about one clan’s journey toward escape and, with it, disconnection, captured by Panahi with a precision and empathy that marks him as a chip off the auteurist block.
On the dusty side of a busy road that winds through rural mountains, a nameless family has pulled over for reasons that are not immediately apparent. Mom (Pantea Panahiha) sleeps in the front seat as scruffily bearded Dad (Hasan Majuni) does likewise in back, their adolescent son (Sarlak)—whose nickname is “Monkey the Second”—idly lounging on his father’s enormous leg cast. The couple’s eldest son (Amin Simiar) walks around the vehicle, grabbing a water bottle and checking on their dog Jessy, who’s sick and residing in the trunk. A weird electronic buzzing noise awakens Mom, who asks her youngest where they are. “We’re dead,” he replies, and though he hardly intends that statement to be literal, there’s a pall hovering over this unit, one that can’t be specifically pinpointed but lingers in the air like an invisible shroud.
Mom quickly deduces that Sarlak’s boy has a cellphone hidden in his pants, which he declares he needs in order to stay in touch with “hundreds” of people, not least of which is a young girl he says will eventually be his bride. This device, however, is viewed as a threat by Mom, who destroys its SIM card and hides it in the rocks near where they’ve stopped, leaving behind a marker so they might retrieve it later—a turn of events to which the young boy inevitably objects. They’re soon back on the road with their elder son behind the wheel, his face boasting the sort of expressionless look that suggests soul-deep misery and fear, and Panahi follows them as they proceed along their chosen route, allowing only the faintest of details to trickle out of their testy exchanges. While concrete details about the purpose of this expedition are sparse, one gleans that a farewell is forthcoming involving the older boy, who a heartache-stricken Mom and morose-looking Dad claim is on his way to meet people who have something to do with his impending marriage.
The further they travel, the more one suspects that Mom and Dad’s story has been designed to placate their live-wire tyke, and that a deeper truth is lurking beneath this charged surface. Hit the Road’s refusal to fully divulge what’s going on is key to its simmering suspense, just as Sarlak’s performance is the engine that propels its humanistic comedy. Bouncing off the walls in their rented SUV (whose windows he draws on with permanent marker) and racing about the barren landscape through which they’re driving, Sarlak is like an animated movie character come to vibrant life, and his irrepressible dynamism and big-dreaming attitude keep the proceedings effervescent even in their darkest moments, as does Dad’s constant exasperation regarding his youngest’s 100 mph verve.
Panahi stages his muted action with subtly striking aesthetics, highlighted by multiple extended shots that gaze out of the SUV’s windows, thereby situating viewers as another member of this distraught clan. His frame is always rich with foreground and background figures and movement, all of which he invites us to inspect during lengthy unbroken takes that spy individuals from a close distance or at a tremendous remove. At the same time, he articulates his characters’ inner conditions through radio pop songs to which Mom, Dad and their youngest son sing along or lip sync, culminating in a final number in the middle of the desert beside a freshly dug grave. It’s an approach that’s at once realistic and stylized, delicate and vivid.
In one of a few tense, melancholy exchanges between Mom and her eldest, the latter states that, in his opinion, the greatest movie ever made is 2001: A Space Odyssey, because “it’s like Zen. It calms you down. Takes you deep into the galaxies.” Such talk about departures into great unknowns naturally upsets Mom, and Kubrick’s classic is again evoked by a later campfire chat during which the younger son lies upon his dad (who’s wearing a heat-maintaining silver jumpsuit) and rambles on about the cost of the Batmobile as lights begin pinging all around them and Panahi’s camera pulls back so far that the duo appears to be floating in the cosmos. Untethered and yet conjoined, detached and yet forever united, this family soldiers onward in the face of a tragedy that numerous others are simultaneously experiencing, and if Hit the Road never makes its central dilemma explicit, that’s only because its portrait of division and dismay is so piercing, and ultimately so emotionally universal, as to require no overt explanation at all.
