Tehran Taxi

Jafar Panahi‘s film, a serio-comic look at contemporary Iranian society, is an extension of his 2010 video diary, This Is Not A Film in which he portrayed his own situation as a film-maker under house arrest and forbidden by the Sharia-ruled government from making films for twenty years .

Here, in what is an example of fictional realism, he casts himself as a taxi driver and uses his various passengers as mules by which to introduce a commentary on the status of Iranian society and film-making in particular.  It’s a cleverly staged film with seemingly two dashboard-mounted videocams enabling Panahi to cut between himself and his passengers who range from an overweight DVD bootlegger with a growth abnormality to a couple of old women with live goldfish in a bowl to his opinionated young niece who is studying film-making.  Arab societies may be male-dominated but the women seem to have no problems airing their opinions and the young girl is forthcoming with advice to her uncle on what constitutes a "distributable" film.

Tehran Taxi is a genial and at times comical ride with Panahi a rather inept taxi driver (as he doesn’t charge most of his passengers who appear to jump in and out of his car at will, one wonders how taxis run in Tehran) but overhanging everything is a sense of oppression and powerlessness.  Early in the film a female passenger takes on a male passenger who suggest hanging a few  thieves as an example to others, a theme which is taken up later on in a conversation between Panahi  and a friend who has been physically attacked while standing up to a man and woman stealing money. Panahi picks up a female lawyer friend who has been forbidden from practicing and they discuss the case of a young woman who has been jailed for trying to attend a men’s volleyball match. Panahi ‘s niece sees a boy taking money that isn’t his and tries to get him to give it back to its rightful owners but he refuses. When contrasted with the civility that characterizes Panahi's passengers, there is in all this callousness a sense of a world out-of-kilter.  Indeed the film ends with the desperate act of someone stealing the cameras from the taxi’s dashboard.

With its high degree of self-referentiality Tehran Taxi assumes that you are familiar with the director’s films or at very least his reputation and history.  If you have an interest in either aspect it is a film worth seeing. 

 

Want something different?