Because it was filmed in Tehran, it also reminds us that when bombs and missiles fall on a place, they are also falling on the people who live there.
Although that should be obvious, mainstream news coverage of the recent war has focused so much attention on the goals of destroying Iran’s nuclear capability and promoting regime change that the human cost of Israeli and American attacks is overshadowed.
Because Jafar Panahi is both a famous film director and a long-time political dissident, remembering that he and many of his collaborators live in Tehran feels especially important right now.
Going to war with a nation means going to war with all of its people, regardless of their relationship with its rulers. That was true during World War II, when the Allies bombed Germany and Japan into oblivion, and has remained true during the many smaller wars that have taken place since, from Korea to Gaza.
Taxi opens with the view from inside an automobile sitting at a red light. Since it is not clear what we are supposed to be looking at, our eyes range back and forth across the frame.
Maybe the relationship between cars and motorbikes catches our attention. Or the signs on ground-floor businesses. Or the way individuals are dressed, particularly how women navigate Iran’s strict dress code for them.
For Western viewers, who have been accustomed to thinking of Iran as an enemy for over four decades, the overall impression is that a veil has been pulled away, permitting us to see what everyday life there is like.
It’s a classic establishing shot, situating us within a bustling urban landscape which looks more like other major cities than not. Perhaps that’s why the local colour we do perceive is supplemented by the sound of an oud, the classic Persian stringed instrument that conjures an Orientalist imaginary for most Western listeners.
Although Jafar Panahi has found it extraordinarily difficult to make films in Iran, he has refused to take the path chosen by other opponents of the country’s theocratic regime, choosing to remain there in spite of the danger to him and his loved ones.
This has led Panahi to become a face of his homeland in the West, perhaps even the best-known one in cultural circles.
When the director was unexpectedly permitted to attend the Cannes Film Festival last month to present his latest film It Was Just an Accident, he wasn’t just representing Iran’s dissident community, but all of his fellow Persians.
The difficulty of playing that double role was apparent after Panahi’s film won the festival’s most prestigious honour, the Palme d’Or.
In the speech the director gave after winning, he confessed to mixed feelings, happy for himself and his team, but sad for all the people in Iran who have been denied the opportunity to express themselves.
Despite his long-standing conflict with the regime, which has resulted in imprisonment and blacklisting, Panahi made it clear that he would not defect. When he returned to Tehran afterwards, supporters at the airport greeted him with applause. And the regime, though unwilling to speak his name, did acknowledge that an Iranian artist had triumphed on the global stage.
It’s important to bear all this in mind when revisiting Panahi’s work, particularly the films he somehow managed to make despite the Iranian courts meting out a 20-year ban on filmmaking in 2010.
Because Panahi’s activity has been so tightly constrained by the Iranian government, Western viewers are tempted to take these films at face value.
This Is Not a Film records his attempt to pursue his craft despite being confined to his own home. No Bears documents the disruption caused by his presence in a village near Iran’s border with Turkey. And Taxi shows an ingenious workaround for his inability to shoot on location.
Although none of these statements are false, they fail to do justice to the complexity of these films.
Panahi is a sincere advocate for freedom of expression and enthusiastically supports the efforts of Iranian women to claw back some of the liberty they lost following Ayatollah Khomeni’s return from exile.
But he is also a trickster figure.
Like his mentor Abbas Kiarostami, Panahi gravitates to scenarios in which the line between fact and fiction blurs.
Thanks to the reputation Panahi has amassed after decades of principled resistance to the Iranian regime, he has been able to pull off feats that would have landed other people in prison long ago or perhaps even led to their execution.
While the state has punished Panahi for his transgressions, his biography reflects a leniency not afforded to the vast majority of Iranians who run afoul of the nation’s leadership. This is demonstrated by the progression he made since the abortive Green Revolution, from being under house arrest; to driving a taxi through Tehran; to traveling to Iran’s dangerous northwestern border; to being permitted to travel to this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
Panahi’s situation calls to mind that of artists and intellectuals from the former Eastern Bloc, who were grudgingly permitted opportunities denied to ordinary citizens because they could improve the regime’s public image in the West.
In the case of Taxi, which won the Golden Bear at the 2015 Berlin Film Festival, the fact that Panahi avoided spending more time in prison is especially noteworthy.
Not only did he make a mockery of his sentence, filming all over Tehran from an automobile outfitted with multiple cameras, his film thematises the self-censorship that living in a surveillance society produces.
Towards the end of Taxi, Panahi picks up his niece from school. A few minutes later, she explains to him that she is supposed to make a short film for an assignment.
The girl tells him that she recently captured an altercation between her grandmother’s neighbors and a young Afghani man who is in love with one of the family’s daughters. Unfortunately, she goes on to explain, this footage is “undistributable.”
The implication is clear. Drawing attention to a negative aspect of Iranian society is strongly discouraged. Although Panahi himself has done so repeatedly, he has paid a high price. Because his niece wants to win her school’s filmmaking contest, she must find a different subject.
At this point, the niece pulls out a point-and-shoot camera and points it at him. Will filming her famous uncle do the trick?
After Panahi stops the car to meet with a friend, we cut to a shot of him opening the door. The angle, one we haven’t seen before, suggests that we are now watching footage filmed by his niece from the front passenger seat.
The shaky, washed-out images that follow reinforce this impression. They also communicate a feeling of danger, as if we are looking at something that might be used as evidence.
Panahi’s friend invites his niece to sit in his car while he talks with the director. But he insists that she leave the camera behind. Then, when he temporarily takes her place in the front passenger seat of Panahi’s vehicle, he hands the director an iPad so that he can watch security-camera footage of a robbery that left the man traumatised. Although he has decided not to report the crime, out of fear that the regime might execute his assailants, he is acutely aware that the mere existence of the footage poses a danger to them.
After this scene, the niece reads her uncle notes from school about how to make a “distributable” film: “Respect the Islamic headscarf. No contact between men and women. Avoid sordid realism. Avoid violence. Avoid the use of a tie for good guys. Avoid the use of Iranian names for good guys. Instead use the sacred names of the Islamic saints.”
At this point, Panahi interrupts to ask the girl how the friend he had just visited with could be represented as a “good guy,” since he was wearing a tie. She offers suggestions, including that the man grow a little beard, since he is clean-shaven like the director.
Then the nice finishes her list of cinematic don’ts: “Avoid discussing political and economic issues.”
“That’s enough,” Panahi interjects.
“My teacher said other things too,” the niece goes on. “She said we should use our judgment. If we notice anything problematic, it’s up to us to censor it.”
At this point the film cuts to a shot of Panahi at the wheel. The wry smile that has been on his face throughout the film is gone. In his place is a clenched jaw and a faraway look.
Almost everything Panahi has done during his filmmaking career breaks these rules for making a “distributable” film.
That’s why, despite the director’s international fame, much of his work never made it into theatres in his homeland.
The reason so many Iranians know his films anyway is that they have been pirated onto DVD and sold on the black market, a vocation pursued by one of Panahi’s passengers .
There is a disjunction in Iran between what is officially permitted and what slips through the surveillance state’s clutches. A quick search on YouTube for videos from the country makes clear that, despite the regime’s strict rules on behavior and attire, plenty of young women are still willing, despite a 2022 crackdown, to take the risk of breaking them.
Those brave, anonymous young people are Jafar Panahi’s inspiration, the reason he continues to push the envelope himself.
Near the end of the film, Panahi picks up a human rights lawyer carrying a bunch of red roses, a woman who helped him during his time in prison. After some short banter, she asks to be let out so that he can complete an errand in the opposite direction from the one she is headed.
“Do your thing. It’s more important,” she states, pulling a rose out of her bunch.
At first it seems as though she is referring to his errand. But then she looks directly into the hidden camera on the dashboard, with a wry smile much like the one Panahi wears for most of the film, and places the rose near the camera mount.
“This is for the people of cinema, because the people of cinema can be relied on.”
Taxi is the perfect kind of film to elicit that support, both in Iran and abroad.
At a time when culture is being diminished throughout the developed world, reduced to the raw material for “AI slop,” we need artists like Jafar Panahi to remind us how much free expression still matters.
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Screenshot courtesy of Kino Lorber. All rights reserved.
