Director Jafar Panahi creates excitement in a small space.
Since 2010 Jafar Panahi has been banned from directing or writing films in his native Iran for flouting the government’s film guidelines. Jafar Panahi’s Taxi is set inside one car and is filmed, seemingly, in real time. Panahi poses as a cab driver, picking up fares in the streets of Tehran, allowing them to talk about morality and movies. It would seem to be a gimmick if it were not born of necessity — and if it were not delivered so masterfully. This is one of the better movies about movies ever made. It forces us to ponder the great philosophical questions: “What is truth” and “Can we control anything?”
Taxi walks a tightrope between documentary and what Iran’s government calls “sordid realism.” It is either a fiction about the true challenges Iranians face every day, or it is a true story filled with made-up characters. Where does fiction end when everything said is true and when at any moment the whole cast could be pulled over and arrested?
This should not be as interesting as it is, yet this taxi-bound film creates excitement within its small confines: We see a man needing a hospital, an old woman holding a sloshing goldfish bowl and traffic merging on tiny streets. But in a land with no freedom of speech, the real tension emerges from normal conversation.
Jafar Panahi’s Taxi screens on Wed., Oct. 7, at 7 p.m. in the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art’s lecture hall.
