Taxi Teheran (2015) Review

Lucas Versantvoort / June 20, 2015

One thing’s for certain: no one’s out there just watching Taxi Teheran. Anyone who’s watched it, or is planning to see it, will do so because of director Jafar Panahi, who was sentenced in 2010 to a six-year jail sentence by the Iranian government and was not allowed to make any more films. Since then, he’s continued making films (one of which was smuggled out of Iran on a flash drive hidden in a cake!), including Taxi Teheran, his latest.

Director/actor Panahi drives a cab and picks up a woman and a man who soon start arguing the merits of capital punishment. They soon leave and one man, an illegal dvd seller, remains who recognizes Panahi and mocks him for trying to make him believe those two weren’t actors. At this point, with Panahi basically mocking his own film, it’s obvious the film’s not the documentary I was expecting, but that doesn’t stop the film from being riveting from beginning to end. The first few passengers are random people, but soon Panahi’s trips become more personal; he picks up his niece and visits a friend he hasn’t seen in years.

Going into Taxi Teheran, I’d heard it was a documentary where Panahi disguises himself as a taxi driver, comes into contact with everyday folks and basically shows daily life in Teheran. Turns out that’s about half of what I got. The end result is more of a blend between documentary and fiction. Pretty much everything’s scripted. From what I can gather, Panahi attempted to film people in his cab, but they kept telling him to stop filming (naturally). So, in the end, Panahi was forced to add some fictional elements. Nevertheless, the real-life situation of the director and the topics discussed by the passengers lend it that decidedly documentary ‘feel’. Panahi doesn’t say much, but we can feel the frustrations that must be boiling underneath the surface, particularly when his niece discusses how to make a film in Iran without risking jail time. She and her classmates have been assigned a task, you see: to make a film, but they have to follow specific steps that render the film ‘watchable.’ The whole story is obviously Panahi mocking the limitations forced on Iranian filmmakers.

I doubt whether Taxi Teheran, as it has turned out, was the film Panahi wanted to make from the start, but the end result is still captivating. Let’s hope Panahi’s next project won’t have to be smuggled out of Iran in a cake…

Stray observation:

(Spoilers) I quite liked how the ending referenced the beginning. In the opening discussion on criminal behavior and capital punishment, we’re told that the crime committed was an act of theft, (I think) a car was stolen. The woman argues we must examine the context. Simply dishing out punishment and hoping the problem goes away means we’ll never arrive at the root of the problem. She tries to look at the situation from the criminal’s point of view: what if he desperately needed the money to provide for his family?

Again, at the halfway point, Panahi meets his friend who was also recently robbed, only this time he thinks he knows who did it. He says he’s capable of thinking rationally about the matter—that he knows the man is now better off financially—but that doesn’t stop the anger inside him from surging every time he sees him.

Fast forward to the end. Panahi’s niece discovers a wallet in the backseat and Panahi thinks he knows to which one of his clients it belongs to. They travel all the way to their destination, get out of the car to return the purse. They disappear off-screen and after a lot of nothing, Panahi’s cab is broken into, his camera stolen; the film ends. It’s a shocking moment, one that of course angers us, but—like the woman in the beginning and Panahi’s friend—we have to consider the context.