Jafar Panahi, “Tehran Taxi” aka “Jafar Panahi’s Taxi” (2015)
Banned by the Iranian government in 2010 from making films, director Jafar Panahi nevertheless managed to make at least three more films (as of this time of review) in ingenious if not always original ways. His 2015 comedy / drama flick “Tehran Taxi”, following in the foot-steps of that uniquely Iranian film genre of taxi dramas (the classic being Abbas Kiarostami’s “Taste of Cherry” which made Homayun Ershadi an international star), poses as a snapshot of life in the streets of Iran as Panahi, playing at taxi driver (and not doing very well at that), picks up passengers and takes them (or not) to their various destinations. What drives the film and makes it appealing despite the supposedly spontaneous nature of the narrative is the conversations the driver and his passengers have, and the underlying political and social context – how to live and survive, and knowing what is right and what is wrong, in a repressive police state that seeks to shape people’s thoughts and behaviour – that unites all that everyone says and does.
The film has a minimalist style with bare-bones musical accompaniment though its look is not as raw and the cameras are not as jumpy as one might have expected. Panahi’s first two passengers have an animated discussion about the effectiveness of capital punishment in deterring future crimes. This discussion ends quite abruptly when the passengers have to leave but the opinions the two express later resurface unexpectedly when Panahi meets an old acquaintance who was recently robbed by an impoverished couple but did not report them to the police – because he feared that they would end up being executed In a subtle way, the film exposes how, in a totalitarian society, the law can be used as a sledgehammer to pound the poor and weak, without tackling and resolving the issue of why people might be driven to commit crimes, and at the same instill fear into others and create disrespect for law and order.
Iran’s treatment of the poor and most socially disadvantaged, and the effect of government propaganda and restrictions on their thinking and behaviour, is demonstrated in various scenes and a tiny sub-plot involving Panahi’s nine-year-old schoolgirl niece Hana Saeidi who is one of his passengers. A woman with an injured husband gets into Panahi’s car early on and he rushes them to hospital; during the trip the husband narrates his will to try to circumvent the law that prevents his sobbing wife from inheriting their home. Two elderly ladies with a bowl of goldfish urge Panahi to rush them to a place where they can return the goldfish and get two new ones before noon, in the belief that their lives will be extended and they won’t suddenly drop dead. In these two scenes, the effect of poverty on people’s lives and their thinking and behaviour which earns them ridicule and isolation can be tragic.
The sub-plot in which Saeidi harangues a poor boy for apparently stealing money from a bridal couple and thus wrecking her school assignment home movie (because his actions don’t fit the school’s requirement that the film be heroic and uplifting, not dark or “sordid”) looks more forced and artificial than the earlier strand with the accident victim, and only manages to succeed to the extent it does due to Saeidi’s bossy-boots character. Initially bright, perky and sassy, the girl becomes a bullying little bitch towards the passive yet rebellious boy and her transformation can be unsettling to watch.
How people manage to navigate or bluster their way around government restrictions is illustrated by a dealer who sells pirated foreign films and gets Panahi to drive him to see a film student, and human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh who discusses the case of a woman, Ghonche Ghatami, jailed for going to see a volleyball game, with Panahi. Even the film itself is Panahi’s attempt to evade the restrictions on his ability to sustain himself and maintain his career, and this along with the dealer’s activities and Sotoudeh’s defiance in continuing her career despite previous imprisonment and torture says much about Iranian spirit and determination in the face of tremendous opposition.
The film turns out to be less spontaneous and improvised than it first appears so the documentary aspect of the film wears out very quickly. “Tehran Taxi” is a vehicle (pun intended) for exploring the effects of an all-encompassing and repressive police state and its ideology on people’s thinking, speech and actions and how all citizens are forced, more or less, to maintain and uphold that structure. Questions of how such control informs people’s morality, what actions people take to circumvent the law and how in control the state actually is, when people find ways to flout its laws, arise. The film’s climax comes as an unexpected and devastating blow when the state makes its move against Panahi and Hana.