Jafar Panahi's Taxi

For me, at least, the most interesting scene in Jafar Panahi's Taxi is the last one. Panahi, after a day of driving a taxing and filming from a dashboard mounted camera, parks the car and he and his tween niece get out and walk home. He leaves the camera running and it records two young men breaking his window and trying to take his recording. We hear one voice saying, "there's no memory stick," and, then, they run away.

This last scene is an important one because it reminds the viewer that Panahi has been arrested and forbidden from making movies. In the same way that parents of small children often learn, telling a person they are forbidden from doing something can be a tremendous incentive to encourage them to do it. Apparently the leaders of the government of Iran have a hard time learning this lesson.

Taxi is a movie in which Jafar Panahi drives around Tehran as a taxi driver and films the people who get in his cab with a dashboard cab. I suspect that, despite the cinema verite appearance of the movie, all of the events and much of the dialogue was scripted. But the performances and dialogue certainly look fresh, original, and unscripted. I believe that anyone who is interested in what the people of Tehran are thinking would do well to start with this movie.

My second favorite scene the movie, after the final one, involves two older taxi passengers. I like Richard Brody's description of the scene in his review:

The movie’s loopiest comic sequence is also one of its quietly angriest ones. It involves two elderly women who are in a big hurry. They’re travelling to a shrine—a spring—with fish in a bowl. They believe that they need to put the fish in the water at a certain time in order to spare themselves certain doom. Here, Panahi presents a pair of charming innocents whose superstitious devotion represents the sort of banal piety that empowers the regime’s religious hypocrisy and righteous pretentions. Ultimately, Panahi finds a pretext to throw the elderly women out of his cab. Though he does so apologetically and respectfully, his contempt for their irrational fanaticism comes through clearly.

Iran has been under the rule of a group of extremist clerics since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. However, Dexter Filkins' recent article in the New Yorker suggests that many of the citizens of Iran are fed up with the status quo.

My host told me that the country has reached a decisive phase. Public confidence in the theocratic system—installed after the Iranian Revolution, in 1979—has collapsed. Soon after Khamenei took power, he promised Iranians that the revolution would “lead the country on the path of material growth and progress.” Instead, Iran’s ruling clerics have left the country economically hobbled and largely cut off from the rest of the world. The sanctions imposed by the United States in 2018, after President Trump abrogated the nuclear agreement between the two countries, have aggravated those failures and intensified the corruption of the governing élite. “I would say eighty-five per cent of the population hates the current system,” my host said. “But the system is incapable of reforming itself.”

Whether Iran does experience a change in government is not something I am not prepared to predict. All I know is that Marta told me that she liked Panahi's movie Taxi even more than his last movie we watched together, The Mirror.

In some ways the taxi in this movie is a metaphor for life in Iran. In private homes and other places where they think the government can not see or hear them, the people of Iran (mostly) lead the lives they want to live. When they are out of their homes in public, they are much more circumspect. Jafar Panahi was able to make a movie where people have honest conversations in a taxi where they did not think the government knew what they were saying.

Panahi is clearly a filmmaker with something to say about contemporary Iranian society. I appreciate the fact that he has found ways to make statements about his country that are also humorous and entertaining movies.