Taxi

Although Jafar Panahi’s Taxi seems to record the random adventurers of a Tehran cabbie, it's a carefully structured script.

The major themes are established in the first scene. The opening shot is a cabbie’s view of a Tehran intersection. The first passengers embody the three intersecting elements: a candid teacher, critical of the country’s execution rate (second only to China) and an admitted mugger, who urges the exemplary hanging of even petty thieves. The chubby dwarf’s black marketing of forbidden foreign films makes him the combination of the two: a cultural champion necessarily made an outlaw.

The director/cabbie hero and the persecuted lawyer/flower lady are more serious versions of the outlaw champion of culture and humanity. Their antithesis are the two elderly woman whose goldfish mission makes them emblems of ancient superstition, without human consideration. Their anger at the cabbie demonstrates how in that world no good deed goes unpunished. 

A closeup of the glorious rose attends the film's distinction between the officially acceptable reality and the "sordid reality" that is prohibited screening. Clearly Panahi exults in the colours and energy of life and human/political engagement. That's why he evades the government’s ban against his making films and finds ways to make and release them anyway.

For Pahlavi filmmaking is as vital as life. The activity pervades the film, not just in his own open recording but in his old friend's video record of his torture (by citizens he recognizes), the injured man’s recorded will, the niece’s school assignment and the wedding recorded in the street behind them. 

When the niece coaxes the street urchin to put back the money he found, her moral lesson is secondary to her need for a positive example that would make her film screenable. The boy's father’s  more urgent need for the money and the groom’s indifference to its loss point to the social inequality which the state would hide as its sordid reality. It is real, and the state’s priorities and failure to address it make it even more sordid than the situation.

In his devotion to honesty, to dealing with the sordid reality, the director identifies himself as the filmmaker turned cabbie and explicitly refers to his filmmaking in progress. After we've learned that he too -- like his old friend and the lawyer -- were 'interrogated' -- I.e., tortured -- the ending is inevitable. As the cabbie returns the old woman’s lost wallet, two masked instruments of the state break into his cab and destroy his camera. They'll get to the director later. The black screen and explanation for the lack of end credits confirm the film's nature: a courageous exercise in outlawed art and humanity.

     However harsh the film’s revelations about life under Iran's tyranny, the engaging characters, their warmth, virtue and grace under pressure, gives Iran some wonderful human relations. It reminds us that there is more to a nation than its government. This glimpse into the country’s humanity is almost enough to make us accept Obama's abject surrender to a nuclear Iran. Almost, because the stakes are too high. Still, this film shows the tyrannical theocracy to be as great an enemy to its own people as to us.