Taxi (2015) - Jafar Panahi

Everyone's favorite oppressed Iranian filmmaker is back as his latest film, Taxi, finds Jafar Panahi posing as a taxi driver in Tehran.  Offering up a slice-of-life type tone in the early going, much of Taxi is a film that simply documents a series of everyday characters in Tehran as they hire Jafar for his driving services.  Sharp, charming, and observant, Jafar Panahi's Taxi feels like a great example of the purest form of objective cinema that documentary filmmaking can provide, beautifully capturing  a city, country, culture, and way of life through the use of a few simple stationary cameras mounted throughout his Taxi.  Jafar Panahi is a very charming guy, and while most of the film finds him essentially smiling as he gives the middle finger to censorship in his home country, one of the film's most intriguing attributes is the aura of poverty, censorship, and oppression that is felt through the various characters he encounters.  There is a such an overwhelming sense of calm throughout Taxi's running time but don't mistake Panahi's calm demeanor as passivity, as there is so much rage bubbling beneath the surface.  Through these various conversations Panahi paints a portrait of a country living in a constant state of oppression and censorship, with my favorite passenger being his adorable niece, a sharp, firecracker of a young lady whose personality almost comes off as jarring, due to the country which she lives in.  Through Jafar's interaction with his niece, the film captures the importance of artistic expression being completely from a personal point-of-view.  Documentary film-making in particular should be about reflecting reality, something which simply cannot occur under the oppressive regime in Iran, which is beautifully illustrated in a charming scene where his niece reads off the vast amount of "rules" to filmmaking supplied by her teacher, all of which stem from the desire to censor voices of dissent.  Featuring a final sequence that viscerally captures the world which filmmaker Jafar Panahi occupies, perhaps Taxi's greatest attribute is simply the reflective nature of this powerful piece of documentary filmmaking, one that reminds the viewer that audience is Jafar's salvation, as viewers of his films make his voice relevant in a regime that tries so desperately to suppress it.  

---