“Jafar Panahi’s Taxi” takes what might sound like an unpromising premise and turns it into a powerful statement about Iranian life and the repression of filmmaker Jafar Panahi. The film was written by Abbas Kiarostami, the renowned Iranian director with whom Mr. Panahi trained.
Mr. Panahi launched his career in 1995 with “The White Balloon,” which won a prize at Cannes. However, his humanistic films raised the ire of the Iranian government, and by 2010 he, his wife, his daughter, and 15 of his friends were arrested and charged with creating propaganda against the government. Mr. Panahi was given a six-year jail sentence, which he appealed, and was forbidden to write or direct films or give interviews for 20 years. Not one to bow to repression, he produced a video diary, “This Is Not a Film,” (2011), which was smuggled out of Iran on a flash drive inside a cake and shown at Cannes.
“Taxi” won a Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival as best film. In it, Mr. Panahi drives a taxi, with a camera mounted on its dashboard, around Tehran. He picks up customers apparently at random (they may or may not have been cajoled to participate) and carries on revealing conversations with them. His first two customers, a man and a woman who are separate fares, get into an argument about whether a tire thief should be executed. The sometimes bumbling Mr. Panahi doesn’t bother to collect fares from either of them, and he doesn’t always know how to deliver his passengers to their destinations. His next customer recognizes him as the celebrated director and involves him with a black-market video seller. Many of the vignettes have a lighthearted, humorous tone, and many make allusions to Mr. Panahi’s earlier films. Cinematic references abound as examples of the filmmaker’s considerable talent.
As the film rolls along in the taxi, a woman shows up, desperate and carrying her husband who has been in a motorbike accident. The injured man insists that Mr. Panahi use his cell phone to record his last will and testament. Two women carrying goldfish in a glass bowl climb aboard in a rush to get to a park where they can release the creatures for reasons that eventually come out. Another customer, a female lawyer, is going to visit another woman imprisoned for attending a volleyball game, which is forbidden to women.
In one of the most extended and telling sequences, Mr. Panahi picks up his niece Hana (Mr. Panahi’s actual niece) after school. They squabble about why he has been late to arrive, then chat about the film short Hana is planning to make for a school project. Hana poses many relevant questions about “sordid realism,” which her teacher has said to avoid in her film.
While these customers, their circumstances and their conversations may seem random, they provide a remarkably insightful look at life in Iran, its culture, and politics. The tone is light and casual, and Mr. Panahi as cab driver is an affable and interested presence, uniting a film with an episodic narrative arc. As much as Mr. Panahi reveals the dark side of life in Iran, he celebrates the resilience of its citizens.
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