The Panahi Conundrum

*This piece was originally written for Movie Mezzanine, on the occasion of the release of Jafar Panahi's Taxi. 

Take a cursory look at reviews for Jafar Panahi’s latest film, Taxi, and you’ll notice it ranks among the year’s most beloved titles. Between its premiere at the Berlinale earlier this year, where it was greeted with the festival’s highest prize, to its theatrical release in North America last week, few Western critics have anything negative to say about it. Yet, despite what one may expect, Iranian critics have not been similarly enthusiastic. This variance in response has as much to do with the film as an individual work of art as it does with Panahi’s career and his politics. To understand this cool critical reaction, it’s necessary to understand the social machinations that gave birth to Taxi.

When Panahi started his career two decades ago, Iranian cinema was at the peak of its artistic renaissance and international acclaim. With his directorial debut The White Balloon, he burst onto the scene as one of the most promising filmmakers at a time when Iran was producing films at a dizzying pace. Compared to the heights of the mid-1990s, Iran’s national cinema has been in decline for the past few years. If not for a handful of veteran directors and an even smaller group of emerging youngsters, Iranian cinema would suffer irreparable artistic regression. If there has been a single director whose consistency in producing challenging works exemplifies the national cinema’s defiance against its own malaise, it’s Panahi.

Having previously won the Camera d’or for The White Balloon and Golden Lion for The Circle, Panahi added the Berlin Golden Bear this year for Taxi, to his ever-expanding collection of festival trophies. Yet, despite the continued reverence of his work abroad, his relationship with audiences and critics at home has never been as complicated as today, a fate indebted in no small part to the aftermath of his political activism. Following his participation in a protest rally on the streets of Tehran back in 2009, Panahi was arrested and later slapped with a severe sentence that included house arrest and a 20-year ban on filmmaking. Ironically, Panahi has made films at a faster pace than ever before since the ban was first imposed, and his cinema has become, for better and for worse, intertwined with his real-life situation.

With This Is Not a Film, his first film under house arrest, Panahi demarcated his career into pre- and post-ban chapters. A rapid-fire reaction to his legal predicament, Panahi’s first documentary was a forced turning of the lens onto himself. He re-enacted the script of his would-be next film in his living room, filming on his cell phone and narrating the plot. The result was sharp and bitterly funny, even though Panahi’s anger and frustration was palpable. It was surprising, though not unexpected, to discover that a director long considered to be one of Iran’s “social filmmakers,” in the local parlance, had actually never made a film so blatantly critical. Despite their darkness and unrelenting pessimism, films like The Circle and Crimson Gold were subtle commentaries on the problems that plague Iranian society. The bleak picture painted of the lives of lower-class women in the former film, for example, is troubling to watch, but not because the film is blunt in its presentation; rather, the effect of the characters’ devastating stories crawls under our skin and lingers long after the film. Conversely, Offside’s rebellious stance against women’s second-class status was wrapped in the guise of an energetic comedy, a blissfully indirect approach to social cinema. This Is Not a Film’s uncharacteristic forthrightness was understandable because of the special circumstances under which it was made, and the film evolved Panahi’s themes and style.

Closed Curtain

TIFF Reviews: Taxi, Desde Allá

*These reviews were originally published at The Film Experience. 

The studio Celluloid Dreams recorded a remarkable success this year by winning the top prize at all of Europe’s big three festivals. The journey started in Berlin with the Golden Bear for Taxi, continued into Cannes with the Palme d'or for Dheepan (review) and ended just last week with Venice's Golden Lion for Venezuela’s Desde Allá. Jafar Panahi’s Taxi is the film that piqued my interest most, both as an Iranian, and as a fan of the auteur’s complex career, which I have followed in real time since his first film—a children’s movie—back in 1995.

Taxi is filmed digitally with incredibly modest means, borne of the director’s complicated situation with government authorities. Panahi plays a taxi driver, on a sojourn across Tehran in which he picks up an assorted range of passengers whose interactions with him shape the film. None of the cameras used ever leave the space of the car. Panahi’s film, influenced by a rich tradition of hybridizing documentary and fiction in Iranian cinema, began to experiment with the limits of fiction in The Mirror. Nearly two decades later—and several similar attempts in between, including the masterful Closed Curtain—he’s back in the same territory, this time to very entertaining effects.

Panahi plays himself, disguised as a taxi driver, and although one suspects the film is entirely scripted, some of the conversations convey no sign of awareness on the passengers’ part. Some recognize him; some berate him for not knowing addresses. The best of these passengers is his niece, a sweet, loud and clever little girl who’s making a short film of her own.

This is one of Panahi’s most accessible films, consistently funny and engaging, and heartwarming, for showing the director in high spirits after the troubles of the past few years. Yet, the complexity and subtlety, the sly sociopolitical commentary seem absent in Taxi. Panahi’s passengers are a checklist of Iranian stereotypes, whose succession of appearances make comic, but not thematic sense. And the introduction of Nasrin Setoodeh, a beloved political activist as one of the passengers, is warm and touching but only serves to make the film more politically overt. Taxi is the director’s most entertaining film, but not his richest or most nuanced.

If the Iranian film is unexpectedly fun, no such thing can be said about Lorenzo Vigas’s debut feature, Desde Allá. The Venice winner tells the story of Armando (Alfredo Castro), a wealthy, lonely and closeted gay man who invites young boys from a poor neighborhood in Caracas to disrobe for him as he pleasures himself. When Elder (Luis Silva) a seventeen year-old petty criminal turns out to be a homophobe, punches Armando in the face and runs away with his money, a curious relationship develops between the two that keeps them going back to each other.

Vigas is very economical with the details of the story. There is very little dialogue in the film apart from cursory conversations and some important background information is left for the audience to guess, often with eerie effect. The reason for Armando’s deep hatred for his father for example, is never explained, but a clear undercurrent in his behaviour. Desde Allá is shot with superb precision, alternating between punishing, sturdy close-ups of the characters and energetic handheld sequences on the streets.

This is quite possibly the most confident film debut of any director in recent memory. Vigas studies societal hierarchies in Venezuela, the exploitative nature of the relationship between the wealthy and the lower classes, the deep-rooted effects of childhood trauma, the melancholia of loneliness and the fluidity of human sexuality, all within the parameters of the most sacred cinematic rule: show, don’t tell. Tense, gripping and with two stellar performances from the central duo, Desde Allá is a film that immediately puts Vigas among the most exciting directors working today.