Arts & Events

Jafar Panahi's Taxi—A Taxi to the Light Side By

Gar Smith
Wednesday October 28, 2015 - 04:18:00 PM

Opens October 30 at the Landmark Shattuck Cinemas

Taking in Jafar Panahi's relaxed manner and sweetly smiling face, you wouldn't judge him to be an enemy of the state. You might not take him to be a world famous film director, writer and producer either. The truth is, Panahi is Iran's most renown film artist. The rest of the truth is deeply ironic: most Iranians have never seen his work. It's been banned.

 

 

 

Panahi's first effort, The White Balloon (which won the Camera d'Or in Cannes in 1977), is the only film that Iran's rulers have allowed the country to see. Meanwhile, outside of Iran, Panahi has racked up a long string of international film festival awards for movies including The Mirror (2000), The Circle (2000), Crimson Gold (2003), and Offside (2010). 

In 2010, however, the director's career was seriously derailed when the government accused him of making "propaganda" and sent him to prison to serve a six-year term. Talk about harsh critics! The authorities in Tehran also imposed a 20-year ban on any further filmmaking. 

A torrent of pleas and protests from filmmakers and filmgoers around the world eventually convinced the authorities to release Panahi after 83 days. The campaign intensified when word leaked out that Panahi had gone on a hunger strike to protest his incarceration. 

Despite having been jailed twice for picking up a camera, Panahi remains unbowed and irrepressible. Within months of his release, he produced a new work (strategically titled "This Is Not a Film"). 

Panahi has continued to violate his "terms of probation" by returning to the director's chair. This Is Not a Film won the 2012 Jury Prize at Cannes and Closed Curtain was honored with a 2013 Silver Bear prize at the Berlin Film Festival. Making "unauthorized" films puts Panihi at risk of a new six-year sentence but he remains undeterred. 

In his latest unauthorized film (set to debut in the US this week), Panahi puts himself in front of the lens and assumes a cinéma vérité role as a sometimes bumbling cab driver navigating the streets of Tehran. Panahi's a bright yellow cab is tricked out with dash-cams that capture his encounters with scores of ordinary women, men and children whose behaviors, conversations, and reactions range from the ordinary to the outlandish. 

This film will leave you wondering: Do most cab drivers encounter such a variety of humanity in the course of an average day? In Panahi's case, his fares include two superstitious women racing to place the lively contents of a goldfish bowl in a nearby lake (to ward off death, no less) and a woman in the backseat wiping blood from the face of her badly injured husband as he struggles to locate a cell phone so he can record his dying wish—that his property should go to his wife, and not to his brothers. 

One of the passengers is a plant: Panahi's actual neice, Hana Saeidi, pretends to be a student filmmaker assigned the daunting task of producing a documentary that will win the approval of the government censors. (With a lively mix of hilarity and impatience, she proceeds to itemize the many ways in which a filmmaker can run afoul of government watchdogs.) 

All the while, Panahi sits behind the wheel, impersonating a cabbie. Smiling through it all, nodding sympathetically as the cameras record hassles, jokesters, confessions, and complainers. It all goes to prove that—despite the demonizing rhetoric of pandering politicians in the US—Iranians are really just like the rest of us. Instantly recognizable in their endearing and exasperating humanity. 

So, if you want to experience some highly entertaining social interactions in an exotic foreign locale, take a ride in Jafar's cab. You won't regret it. 

And let's hope Panahi has no cause for regret, either. As the director and his fans understand all too well, each time he makes a new film, "it could be his last."