Text / Willow Warbler
Jaffa Panasi, who was deprived of his freedom of life by the Iranian government in 2006 for his "crime of endangering the image of the country", won this year's Berlin Golden Bear with his "Taxi". The verb "to hold" is really not very appropriate. I still remember that in 2011, Berlin invited the director to serve as a member of the jury. The director who was behind bars at that time could not be there in person. The film festival also reserved a space for it, and various filmmakers also voiced their support. Four years later, the ban has not yet been lifted, and everything reappears as yesterday. In the press conference after the awards ceremony, surrounded by countless flashing lights, the lonely golden bear is embarrassing.
"Taxi" is a work full of courage. Jaffa Panasi resisted political high pressure and challenged the ban on "twenty-year no filming" in various dangerous ways. Like "This Is Not a Movie" and "Closing" in the early years, "Taxi" is also his hidden image expression. Following the tactics of his predecessor Abbas in "The Rhythm of Life in Time", Panasi disguised himself as a taxi driver who shuttled through the streets. Portable photography equipment allows him to complete the standard process of filming under the most restrictive conditions.
In this self-written, self-directed and self-acted film, Panasi returned to the streets of Tehran, where he had been away for more than ten years, and used the camera hidden in the yellow taxi to record the various speeches to the passengers, writing for the interweaving of light and dark in contemporary Iranian society. Make a simple footnote. Fiction and reality blur the line in the movie, reminding people of Mina who dropped the plaster in front of the camera in "Who can take me home" and yelled "I don't want to make a movie".
In "Taxi", ordinary people hurriedly boarding the car, their various conversations about social issues seem to be casual in daily life, but they directly poke the weakness of the country in the deep system of the system.
In "Taxi", the ordinary people who hurriedly board the car seem to be real passengers who accidentally enter the set, but they are actually extras scheduled by the director. Their various conversations about social issues seem to be casual, but sentences in daily life. The sentence directly pokes at the weakness of the country's Tibetans in the depths of the system. As a mobile mini studio, the taxi has become an excellent place to observe the various forms of living beings. The arrival of every passenger is the beginning of a new exchange. The dialogue is sometimes like light spit, black humor full of modern elements, and sometimes It turned sharply again, spinning around in the heavy political whirlpool. These paragraphs are all digging towards a common theme under the arrangement of the editing and editing in order of priority and urgency.
The men and women who did not know each other had a heated argument during the short journey over whether the thief should be hanged. Tehran’s special taxi carpooling business provides space for communication and debate for strangers. The film passes through this bridge and directly focuses its attention on the reality of Iran. In the mouths of people from different perspectives, this regulation will be universally justified for a while. The standard, for a while, was a brutal atrocities that wiped out humanity. Both the supporter and the opponent held their own grounds. The stalemate disputes even fermented a sense of absurdity in a small taxi. This sense of absurdity continues to be strengthened in the next part of the movie. Whether it is a chattering pirated disc dealer or a wife who is heartbroken by her husband’s car accident but is concerned about inheritance, they are the weakest chess pieces in Iranian society, like a roller coaster. The changes in the plot caused their behavior to go back and forth between restraint and out-of-control, and all the outbursts of hysteria and the helplessness of bowing their heads and weeping, in Panasi’s record, were all attributed to the wanton flow of social injustice, and it was impossible to fight against the people. In the crevice of life, I use my cleverness to swallow a gap forward.
"Taxi" deliberately focuses on the role of video recording in modern society. For Panasi, this is undoubtedly a major self-referential proposition. From the surprised expressions of passengers when they spotted the camera, to the disc dealers talking about the effect of pirated discs on the cultural enlightenment of Iranians, the use of images to express the original intention of pursuing artistic freedom has been constantly raised in the film. When the director’s niece got in his taxi and took out a small camera from his school bag, preparing to shoot a "film that can be released" as taught by the teacher, the director finally couldn’t help being silent. The listener became a bitter venter, criticizing the Iranian government for its ruthless suppression of cultural creation. The female lawyer holding flowers recalled her career terminated because of the defense of a political prisoner, and finally turned the second half of "Taxi" into a film about Panasi herself.
Compared with the first two works after being banned, Panasi, struggling for a long time in pain and resentment, finally found a way of expressing weightlessly, making the wry smile at the injustice of the world as interesting as a vignette.
Due to the limitation of shooting conditions, the lens of "Taxi" was fixed in a small car, and the enclosed space became the carrier of Iranian social metaphor. Occasionally, the director will carefully move the camera, aiming at the chaotic and noisy streets of Tehran outside the car window. The angle change not only breaks the dullness that may be caused by the single form of the film, but also touches the vast civilian society through the extension of the perspective. Both ironic and humorous, spicy and sad films have become a prism that reflects contemporary Iran. The start and stop of the car at the beginning and end of the movie, like the opening and closing of a drama, is a sense of ritual for daily life. The main part of the pseudo-documentary flows naturally, and the layering created by the different dialogue passages effectively compensates for the shortcomings of photography, making this 90-minute film full of plot tension from beginning to end.
Compared with the first two works after being banned, Panasi, struggling for a long time in pain and resentment, finally found a way of expressing weightlessly, making the wry smile at the injustice of the world as interesting as a vignette. It is true that behind this golden bear in Berlin, there must be a bonus for political sympathy, but the special temperament of being bright and heavy, and the artistic ambition of looking at the overall situation from the crevices, it is destined that "Taxi" is a worthy one. A masterpiece to remember.
The original text was published in the 2015.4 issue of "Movie World"
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