BENDING THE RULES
Banned filmmaker makes film about film bans in Iran
The Jafar Panahi who shows up in front of the camera is a decidedly avuncular sort. He’s freely chatty with almost everyone who gets into his cab: patiently listening to an old neighbour, playfully teasing his precocious niece, even politely dismissing a film bootlegger who tries to use the director’s good name to sell a couple of extra pirated DVDs. When we do get glimpses of him, he’s rarely without an almost beatific smile.
The Jafar Panahi working behind the camera, on the other hand, is clearly working out some righteous, fully justified anger. The Iranian government has technically forbidden Panahi from making movies since 2010 — a ban that has coincided with one of his most productive and internationally recognized periods, Taxi having come hot on the heels of Closed Curtain and This Is Not a Film, both of which were shot in secret in one location. The sheer absurdity of cracking down on any artist, particularly one so fulsomely empathetic and curious, simmers under every scene here, conversations about criminals and cinema swirling around the cab’s four small seats. As confined as the film is, though, the director leaves no doubt that it’s what’s outside the doors that’s truly stifling.
The film is nothing more than a series of passengers getting in and out, Panahi having brilliantly surmised that there’s nothing more seditious, nor compelling, than people talking freely. It kicks off with two passengers debating about what’s to be done with thieves who have stolen some car tires — the appropriate treatment of criminals pops up again and again. The futility of the government’s heavy-handed methods becoming something of a running theme: Not only does it not stop people (which the mere existence of the movie proves), but it even makes people reluctant to report crime, for fear of what it might mean for the neighbours who are perpetrating it. This emerges, in one particular conversation, as a sort of humanist rebuttal to the paranoia of a police state, empathy among the oppressed.
If criminality is a nastily nebulous thing in Iran — at one point, Panahi and a passenger, a prominent Iranian human rights lawyer, casually bring up their respective hunger strikes in jail — culture, specifically represented by cinema, is a beacon. At one point an injured, possibly dying man, whom Panahi is taking to the hospital, begs for a camera. It’s a heavy-handed way to make the point, but Iran is not a place of subtlety at the moment. Panahi gets into it deeper with his niece, who has been tasked with making a film for class: She recites a list of rules her teacher has given her, which incites a long discussion about what is worth putting on film, and what constitutes the “sordid realism” the government is so keen on keeping off it. One bleakly funny aside features Panahi’s niece upbraiding a young boy for stealing — not for doing it, exactly, but for doing it while she was filming: Such bad behaviour will ruin the movie’s chances of being released.
This long discussion, which weaves in an out of the back half of the film, serves as Panahi’s ultimate rebuke. Through his niece’s struggle to understand the absurd rules of filmmaking in Iran, he’s all but screaming at the cultural overlords: When even a child recognizes your ridiculousness, maybe it’s time for you to grow up.