Jafar Panahi (2015)

This is the third film made by Jafar Panahi since 2010, when the Iranian authorities legally banned him from making movies, for twenty years.  Taxi[1] follows This Is Not a Film (2011) and Closed Curtain (2013).  As in This Is Not a Film, Panahi, as himself, is present almost throughout; unlike This is Not a Film, Taxi is categorised on IMDB as a drama rather than a documentary.  (Panahi as himself was a significant figure in Closed Curtain too but he wasn’t continuously on screen.  The plot synopsis on Wikipedia suggests it may have been relatively easy to class this film, which I’ve not seen, as drama rather than documentary.)  When Taxi won the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin Festival, there was, according to the Guardian:

‘… an awkward response from the Iranian government’s film arm, the Cinema Organisation, whose Hojjatollah Ayyubi celebrated Panahi’s win and even his flouting of his film-making ban, while simultaneously accusing the festival of spreading “misunderstandings”. “I regret that you wish to drive everybody in a taxi of new misunderstandings about the Iranian people by screening a film made by a director who has been banned by law from making films,” Ayyubi said. “But nevertheless, he has done exactly that. I am delighted to announce that the director of Taxi continues to drive in the fast lane of his life, freely enjoying all of its blessings.”’

It’s hard not to see this presumably official reaction as a fine example of political truth being more absurd than political fiction and, as such, making academic the question of whether the events of Taxi are real or contrived.  I think the distinction between the two is nevertheless important:  how a viewer receives the film will depend considerably on whether they think they’re watching documentary reality as opposed to dramatic truth.

Taxi, which runs just eighty-two minutes, is, at one level, a day in the life of a Tehran taxi driver.  The taxi driver is, however, a well-known film director called Jafar Panahi and plenty of his fares recognise him.  I guess it’s possible that Panahi, who is no longer under house arrest (although still forbidden to travel outside Iran), really is now second-jobbing as a cabbie.  I assume, though, that he’s in the driving seat purely for purposes of making this film – to call his passengers ‘fares’ is virtually a misnomer:  if money changes hands in the course of Taxi, I missed it.  The selection of pick-ups serves as a series of illustrations of what is normal life, and what is repressive about normal life, in present-day Tehran.  And ‘selection’ surely is the operative word.   Panahi’s companions in the taxi are repeated reminders of his proper vocation.  They include a man selling pirated videos, a film studies student, and Panahi’s young niece, Hana Saeidi, who, after her uncle, has the largest amount of screen time in Taxi.   Panahi picks Hana up from school, where she’s been given a project to make a ‘screenable’ film.  She uses a camera off and on during the taxi ride.

Hana lists the criteria for screenability, according to her schoolteacher’s instructions:  these include, inter alia, respecting the veil, avoiding ‘sordid realism’, having good guys not wear ties and giving them, rather than Iranian names, the names of Islamic saints.  Hana Saeidi, like all the other members of the cast, performs very naturalistically, but it was parts of the exchanges between her and Panahi that caused me to realise that Taxi was more scripted than I had at first thought.   The impression was reinforced by a later passenger, a woman human rights lawyer who is facing suspension by her professional association.  (According to the film critic Jean-Michel Fordon, all the people who appear in the film are non-professional actors whose identities, except for Panahi and Hana, remain anonymous.)  The lawyer is a radiant, almost elating presence but, when she talks about someone coming out of prison to find the world outside is a larger prison, she echoes very closely words that Jafar Panahi used a few years ago, shortly after his release from jail.

The most remarkable sequence in Taxi is the last; this is also the sequence which seems to raise most urgently, then resolves most definitely, the question of what kind of reality the film is describing.  Hana discovers a purse on one of the back seats of the taxi.  Panahi realises it must have been left by one of two women who were in the cab earlier and on their way to pray at a place called Ali’s Well.  He drives there and sees the two women.  He and Hana get out of the taxi; they walk in the direction of Ali’s Well and away from the camera inside the cab.  They disappear from view.   Like the opening sequence of the film, as Panahi’s taxi and camera move along the streets of Tehran, the view is of, and through, the car windscreen.  (The dashboard below is now beautified by a red rose, left there, as a gift, by the lawyer.)  A motorcycle stops a few yards ahead and its rider seems to approach the taxi.  He, or someone, breaks into the vehicle and removes the camera.   Whether he’s a common thief or a government agent is almost beside the point.  The theft of the camera, whether actual or symbolic, hasn’t really occurred, as the existence of Taxi proves.  The climax naturally brings to mind what Panahi said in This Is Not a Film:  ‘It is important the camera stays on.’  Like that earlier film, there’s a risk that the circumstances in which this one has been made will cause admiration for Jafar Panahi’s courage and resourcefulness to eclipse critical judgment.  In the end, though, I had few reservations about being impressed by Taxi – because I was clear that it’s a highly unusual drama.  This is not a documentary.

17 November 2015

[1]  The film is also known as Jafar Panahi’s Taxi and, for the UK cinema release, as Taxi Tehran.