Taxi Tehran review – Jafar Panahi’s joy ride

Much loose talk is bandied around in the film world about directors’ bravery and the heroism of “guerrilla” film-making – but those terms genuinely mean something when applied to Iran’s Jafar Panahi. After making several robust realist dramas about the challenges of everyday life in his country – among them The Circle, Crimson Gold and the exuberantly angry football movie Offside – Panahi fell foul of the Iranian government, which threatened him with imprisonment, prevented him from travelling and banned him from making films for 20 years. He has protested by working under the wire to make three extraordinary works, contraband statements that are at once a cri de coeur from internal exile, and a bring-it-on raised fist of defiance.
This Is Not a Film (2011, directed with Mojtaba Mirtahmasb) showed Panahi cooling his heels under house arrest in his Tehran flat, and evoking the film that he would have made had he been allowed to pick up a camera. He wasn’t technically making an actual film, Panahi argued – yet he was manifestly making one anyway, as the world saw when the result was smuggled to Cannes on a USB stick hidden in a cake. However, the less successful Closed Curtain (2013, directed with Kambuzia Partovi) was a claustrophobically self-referential chamber piece, and suggested that Panahi’s plight was getting the better of him.
However, his survivor spirit and delight in cinema’s possibilities have endured, and re-emerge to sparkling effect in Taxi Tehran (or plain Taxi, as it was called when it won the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin film festival). For this spare, witty exercise, Panahi rigged a taxi with three hidden video cameras and surreptitiously filmed a drive round Tehran, with himself at the wheel ferrying assorted passengers – presumably actors for the most part. One assumes that everything is staged; such is the feel of brisk spontaneity that it’s hard to tell.