Taxi Tehran

Jafar Panahi’s recent protest trip­tych – This Is Not a Film, Closed Cur­tain, Taxi Tehran – could be con­strued as crim­i­nal acts in the eyes of the Iran­ian gov­ern­ment. Teth­ered to a life­time film­mak­ing ban and extend­ed house arrest, Panahi has nev­er­the­less endured by cre­at­ing inno­v­a­tive works that stand up to oppres­sion through tena­cious resolve. If the direc­tor is indeed an ene­my of the state, the inter­na­tion­al film com­mu­ni­ty has been his will­ing and vocal accomplice.

Sol­i­dar­i­ty is a strong theme in Taxi Tehran, Panahi’s most play­ful and hope­ful film in years. A seam­less and sub­ver­sive mesh­ing of doc­u­men­tary and fic­tion, it finds Panahi dri­ving around Tehran pos­ing as an every­day cab­bie, inter­act­ing with cus­tomers (or are they actors?) in a vari­ety of con­ver­sa­tions. These dis­cus­sions range in tone from triv­ial to seri­ous, each hing­ing on a character’s abil­i­ty (or lack there­of ) to empathise with anoth­er. The bat­tle for artis­tic and polit­i­cal free­dom under­lines them all.

Firm­ly root­ed in the driver’s seat, Panahi nev­er­the­less posi­tions him­self as the cap­tain of a ves­sel con­trolled by the whims of oth­ers. There is no end des­ti­na­tion, only the move­ment between places that are sup­posed to be off lim­its for the cam­era. He lis­tens to an array of pas­sen­gers gripe about the gov­ern­ment, watch­es an injured man get loaded into the back­seat, speaks about state- con­trolled cen­sor­ship with his niece Han­nah, and humours an ador­ing DVD pirate who recog­nis­es the auteur immediately.

Despite tak­ing place active­ly in the out­side world, Taxi Tehran still retains a feel­ing of entrap­ment. Per­ma­nent­ly fixed on the dash­board, the image feels locked in, just as much a pris­on­er as the film­mak­er who can only expe­ri­ence the out­side world pos­ing as some­one else. The cam­era still moves (Panahi man­u­al­ly con­ducts a few shot-reverse shots), but pas­sen­gers often mis­take it for some­thing else (one man refers it to as an anti-theft device).

This Is Not a Film and Closed Cur­tain high­light the enraged pulse of polit­i­cal cin­e­ma liv­ing and breath­ing in con­fined pri­vate spaces.Taxi Tehran advances Panahi’s aes­thet­ic by expos­ing the con­tra­dic­tions of ide­o­log­i­cal and polit­i­cal rhetoric in the pub­lic are­na. ​“You live in anoth­er world,” yells a man argu­ing with a stranger sit­ting in the back­seat. They bick­er over the moral lat­i­tude of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, Panahi (and the audi­ence) caught in the mid­dle. When it’s revealed that the man is him­self a bur­glar, the entire con­ver­sa­tion takes on an absurd quality.

Taxi Tehran has a grand sense of humour. It rather lov­ing­ly sug­gests that crime and pun­ish­ment are rel­a­tive terms; one man’s seri­ous offence is anoth­er woman’s slap on the wrist. What’s clear, though, is that the cin­e­ma can help clar­i­fy these gra­da­tions when exam­ined by artists that still see hope in human nature and art itself. Look no fur­ther than the quote spo­ken by Panahi’s civ­il rights attor­ney late in the film: ​“Here is a rose for the peo­ple of cin­e­ma, because the peo­ple of cin­e­ma can be relied on.”

That flower rests on the dash­board dur­ing the final long take, in full view until two thieves lit­er­al­ly steal the image away from us. It would be easy to get enraged by the inter­rup­tion, but like Panahi does so often inTaxi Tehran, it’s hard not to smile.