The Berlinale film festival’s Golden Bear award has just gone to a movie in which next to nothing happens, made on no budget, without professional actors, without even any closing credits, filmed almost entirely inside a car driving around Tehran.
You might think Taxi, from Iranian director Jafar Panahi, sounds like one to miss, however worthy it may seem. You’d be wrong. For Taxi is not only a vindication of Panahi’s commitment to carry on making movies, despite the Iranian government’s attempts to suppress him; it’s quite simply enchanting — touching, funny and memorable. It demonstrates just how little you need to make great cinema, if you have talent and something to say. At a time when so much of the product churned out by the big studios is demeaning and cynical, that’s a joyful affirmation.
For 20 years, Panahi’s humanitarian films such as The Circle, about the lives of women in Iran, and Crimson Gold, about a pizza delivery man’s failed attempt at a robbery, have been acclaimed on the festival circuit. They haven’t, however, endeared him to the Iranian government’s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance.
In 2010, Panahi was arrested for “propaganda against the Islamic Republic” and sentenced to six years in prison, a sentence still hanging over him, and banned for 20 years from directing movies, writing screenplays, giving any form of interview or leaving the country.
He has responded by continuing to make samizdat films: first a smuggled video diary, This Is Not a Film (2011), and then Closed Curtain (2013), shot in secret in his own home. Now, in Taxi, he adopts the method beloved of his mentor Abbas Kiarostami: filming inside a car being driven around, so creating an intermediary space between inside and out.
Panahi himself drives and the action comes from the various people who get in, captured by a couple of tiny cameras on the dashboard, giving surprisingly high-quality images.
In the first scene, an aggressive man starts saying it would be a good thing to hang a couple of thieves. A woman in the back seat vehemently objects, saying the thieves might be poor — the dialogue rattles on as frenetically as in a classic Hollywood comedy.
Suddenly the taxi is stopped for a man with a bloody head wound after a bike accident, his howling wife insisting that he be taken to hospital. En route, the man dictates an Islamic will, filmed on Panahi’s mobile, leaving everything to his wife rather than his brothers. Afterwards, when he doesn’t die, his wife harasses Panahi to give her the file. It’s so natural yet so inventive — and when special effects are needed, all it takes is a couple of goldfish in a bowl …
Later, there’s a smart cameo by Panahi’s 10-year-old niece, who wants to be a film-maker herself. At school she’s been given a strict set of rules about what is appropriate and forbidden in Islamic film-making. “What exactly is ‘sordid realism’?” she asks. “There are realities they don’t want shown,” Panahi tells her. This girl, Hana Saeidi, accepted the prize on Panahi’s behalf in Berlin, breaking down in tears.
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I saw Taxi among a huge public audience who cheered and applauded wildly, not just for Panahi’s defiance but for pleasure given and received. Big budgets aren’t necessary for great film-making. It’s good to be reminded of that as we head towards this weekend’s Oscars frenzy.
