Taxi Tehran, film review: enchanting film-making

With just three tiny cameras, a bunch of roses and no budget, this enchanting film shot in the back of a taxi shows how little you need to make a great movie, says David Sexton
Driven to create: Jafar Panahi’s niece in the back of his taxi
David Sexton30 October 2015

You like films about cars, you think? James Bond, The Italian Job, The French Connection, all that? Maybe you’ve never seen a real one. Taxi Tehran (just called Taxi when I first saw it at the Berlin Film Festival in February, where it took the top prize) is filmed entirely in a non-descript taxi being driven around Tehran by the film’s director, Jafar Panahi.

It was made in just 15 days (both shoot and edit) on no budget (the main special effects are provided by two goldfish and a bunch of red roses) and filmed by three tiny high-definition digital cameras fixed to the dashboard of the car, rotatable by hand from time to time, supplemented by a few shots looking out from the car taken by one of Panahi’s passengers, his endearing 10-year-old niece using her compact camera. And that’s it. No supercars, no chases, no shootings — though there is a minor incident when Panahi, an engaging chap with a smiley, rubbery face but unfortunately a terrible driver, brakes a bit suddenly and nearly does for those goldfish.

So why would you want to see this film when you could be watching the Avengers demolish a city or Mad Max getting really furious? Just for pleasure, actually. It is enchanting film-making, showing how little you really need if you love and understand cinema.

Due to the restrictions imposed on Panahi by the Iranian government and “the Ministry of Islamic Guidance”, Taxi Tehran has no credits. But it can be assumed that although it has such a documentary style the scenes it depicts are acted or improvised by an unpaid cast.

Glorious: Taxi Tehran is full of humanitarian significance, but is simply a wonderful film, too

In Tehran taxis are shared — and Panahi makes the most of this. The first scene is a cracker. An aggressive man in the front seat starts saying it would be a good thing to hang a couple of thieves to shake up the rest. A woman in the back seat vehemently objects, saying the thieves might be poor, doing it out of need, and that Iran already executes more people than any country except China.

The dialogue is as fast and frenetic as in a classic Hollywood comedy. The man demands to know her job and laughs in her face when she says she’s a teacher. He says he’s freelance — only revealing, once he is safely out of the car, that his “speciality is mugger”.

A spivvy little guy called Omid then gets in and recognises Panahi because he’s a dealer in pirate DVDs, enabling lots of film chat. Omid considers himself a parallel cultural entrepreneur. Suddenly the taxi is stopped for a man reeling from a head wound after a bike accident, his howling wife insisting he is dying and must be taken to hospital. En route, the man dictates an Islamic will, filmed for the record on Panahi’s mobile phone by the DVD salesman, leaving everything to his wife, rather than his brothers. Afterwards, when it turns out that he’s not dying, his wife keeps calling Panahi to give her the file — just in case, she says.

Off Panahi and the salesman go, to see one of his customers who has ordered The Walking Dead Series 5 (great choice), but this guy is a film student and he too recognises Panahi and gets embarrassed, saying it’s for his family and he only likes art house stuff — the dealer duly presenting him with “a rare old Kurosawa”.

The man says he is trying to make a short film but can’t find a good subject. “Listen, those films are already made, those books are already written. You have to look elsewhere. No one can tell you. You must find it for yourself,” Panahi tells him, a credo of a kind.

Next up are a pair of bad-tempered, highly talkative elderly sisters, determined to release their lucky goldfish in “Ali’s spring” by noon because, they believe, their lives depend on it.

Panahi goes on to pick up his niece from school. She too wants to make movies — and starts filming him. At school she’s been given a strict set of rules about what is appropriate and forbidden in Islamic film-making, including respect for the veil, no contact between men and women, avoiding the use of the tie for good guys and shunning “sordid realism”.

“What exactly is sordid realism?” she asks.

“There are realities they don’t want shown,” Panahi tells her.

“I don’t get it,” she says, making a childish moue of incomprehension and impatience that’s more telling than any argument against censorship.

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The final part of the film becomes more politically explicit as they pick up the human rights activist and disbarred lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, who is on her way, with a bunch of roses, to visit a woman in the notorious Evin prison, jailed for trying to enter a stadium to watch a men’s volleyball game. In 2010 Sotoudeh herself was sentenced to 11 years for defending dissidents, serving three in solitary confinement before being released after international pressure. Before she gets out, she lays a red rose in front of the camera and says, “This is for the people of cinema because the people of cinema can be relied upon. Just like you. I put it here.”

In 2010 Panahi was arrested on a charge of propaganda against the government and sentenced to a six-year jail term and a 20-year ban on film-making, scriptwriting, giving interviews or leaving the country, except for medical treatment or the Hajj.

Since then, however, Panahi has succeeded in making This Is Not a Film, shot inside his apartment and shown at Cannes after being smuggled out on a data stick inside a cake, and another highly constricted piece, Closed Curtain, shown at Berlin in 2013. With Sotoudeh, he won the EU’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought in 2012. He himself says simply “I’m a film-maker. I can’t do anything else but make films. Cinema is my expression and the meaning of my life.”

Taxi Tehran shows that gloriously. Quite apart from its humanitarian significance, it’s just a great ride. Sod the DB10.

Cert 12A, 82 mins

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