242. Israeli director Nadav Lapid’s French/Israeli film “Synonymes” (Synonyms) (2019): A disturbing tale of extreme alienation and nihilism, contrasting the social realities of Israel with that of France

Synonyms’ protagonist Yoav (Tom Mercier) is an Israeli Jew who grew up with his parents in Israel and has been through the mandatory military training and perfected his skills to the extent he can shoot with his sophisticated automatic machine gun to rhyme with musical pieces just for the fun of it and even claims to have perforated Arab terrorists with his shooting skills. That was Yoav’s past, glimpses of which are briefly shown in the film. The Yoav you see for most of the 2 hour-long  Synonyms is a young man so disillusioned with his native land, his parents, his native tongues (Yiddish and Hebrew), and  the Israeli armed forces that he has chosen flee his country and start a new life in France by mastering the French language with the aid of a dictionary.

Yoav robbed of all his belongings
almost freezes to death in an empty apartment

While the original script, co-written by director Nadav Lapid and another individual named Haim Lapid (who might or might not be related), stresses Yoav’s alienation from Israel, Israelis expatriates in Paris seem to be able contact him and help him get a job to survive, after he is robbed of all his possessions. In spite of his professed hatred of anything Israeli, the job offered is ironically as a security guard at the Israel embassy in Paris, where Yoav responds in French, when spoken to in Yiddish by his colleagues. Yoav’s alienation is extended to his family as well. He tells his new French benefactors that his father is dead (when he is actually alive) and that his mother laughed loudly during his military service graduation ceremony. When his father travels to Paris to meet him and help him with monetary assistance, Yoav is rude towards him and refuses to speak with him.

Yoav (Tom Mercier) in a yellow coat with his French benefactors,
Emile and Caroline

Yoav clearly wants to be assimilated into the French society while he rejects his own Israeli roots, even though he thinks singer Celine Dion is French, when she is Canadian.  The clever script presents a French unmarried couple, Emile and Caroline,  who revive him when he is nearly frozen in his bath tub having been robbed of all his clothes and money. The French duo extends money, clothes, and friendship without asking anything in return. They do not exhibit any racism, in contrast to what Yoav experienced and was indoctrinated in Israel. Yoav is clearly not a religious Jew either.

The script moves gradually to existential nihilism with Yoav who once loved music to rebuke orchestra members, revoke friendship with an extraordinary and selfless French friend by asking him to return Yoav’s writings that Yoav had himself generously gifted earlier, and insult Yoav’s French wife who too had been his admirer (she even referred to him as ‘the monk’) and lover.

The silver lining of the bleak original screenplay is perhaps the symbolic references to the Greek epic poem by Homer called Illiad, specifically the final encounter between Hector and Achilles outside the ramparts of Troy besieged by the Greek army.  Yoav tells his French benefactors that his parents used to read to him the story of Hector when he was four years old, making Yoav to become increasingly fond of the Trojan hero who challenged Achilles to a single mortal combat. But Yoav’s parents refused to reveal the outcome of that encounter. It is well known that Achilles defeated Hector and killed him and then dragged his body around the ramparts of Troy. In the disturbing film Synonyms, we are shown a vehicle dragging a man in the empty streets of a modern city at night, much like Hector’s body was dragged to prove some bizarre point.

Emile arranges the marriage of Yoav and Caroline,
so that Yoav can become a French citizen

Perhaps director Nadav Lapid wants to project Yoav who leaves Israel as being somewhat similar to Hector who went out of the secure fortress of Troy, much against the wishes of his wife, only to be killed and humiliated in death.

The film Synonyms reminds you of the 2018 Chinese film An Elephant Sitting Still.  Both the films won the FIPRESCI prize at the Berlin film festival in successive years, and Synonyms went on to win the Golden Bear for the Best Film in competition at Berlin. Both films are nihilistic. Both films indirectly criticize the country of the respective director’s birth. Synonyms won the best cinematography award in Israel and understandably was not bestowed any major award. Synonyms is being screened at the Denver Film Festival kicking off soon.

The film Synonymsis not a film that extends universal appeal; yet it has won the hearts of the jury members at Berlin and members of Israel's film academy. What the film does indeed present positively is the French spirit of equality, liberty and fraternity.

P.S.  An Elephant Sitting Still (2018) was reviewed earlier on this blog. Note the inverted Eiffel Tower in Synonyms' poster above!

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234. Russian director Aleksei German, Jr.’s sixth feature film “Dovlatov” (2018) (Russia): A soulful reduction of the travails of a Russian writer of repute, intelligently collapsed into six interesting, representative days in 1971 of Brezhnev-era USSR, providing the viewer a mirror image of what director Aleksei German, Sr., endured as a creative filmmaker battling censors in that same timeframe.

“Dovlatov was a sex symbol, an Elvis Presley, a legend (in Russia)” – director Aleksei German, Jr., on the writer Dovlatov,  in an interview published in Sight and Sound

“I saw Brezhnev in my dream. We drank pina coladas and discussed socialism. He promised to help (me get published).” Dovlatov to his mother, waking up in the morning on the first of the “6 days of 1971” shown in the film

Dovlatov is an exceptional film and one of the most mature cinematic works made in 2018. Why is it exceptional?  It encapsulates the world and travails of Russian writer Sergei  Dovlatov (1941-90), friend and contemporary of eventual Nobel Prize winner Joseph Brodsky  and their interactions in Leningrad (now St Petersberg) preceding the decision of Brodsky to emigrate to the United States within a part-realistic, part-fictional representative 6 days of 1971. The year 1971 is typical of a particular Soviet mindset within former USSR (now primarily Russia, having subsequently divested off several Republics as independent countries) when Leonid Brezhnev was its leader and its budding writers and filmmakers had to be included in official Unions (thus toeing official points of view) to flourish in their respective creative fields. Dovlatov was forced to work on a shipyard’s newsletter as a journalist and write on subjects that pleased his employers (the government) while all his 300 odd creative pieces of writing would get rejected by publishers of books and journals.

Dovlatov (Milan Maric), his wife and his daughter stare at the hopelessness
of Dovlatov's future with a miserly income as a journalist
 and no scope of acceptance as a writer

When director Aleksei German, Jr., makes a film on writer Dovlatov and his travails to get his writings published, the filmmaker is merely mirroring the troubles of his own father Aleksei German, Sr. to make his own films in the same time period in USSR.  It was in 1971, the year underlined and projected in the movie Dovlatov, that Aleksei German, Sr., made his film Trial on the Road, a film banned by the Brezhnev regime and one that made the film director famous worldwide when it was released in 1986, when Gorbachev came to power. The film had argued that heroes and traitors were the same, only a matter of differing perspectives.

The wry humour/irony of the Trial on the Road and the problems of his famous father in getting his film released are recast by German, Jr. in Dovlatov through the frustrations of the writer Sergei Dovlatov using a 6-day period of 1971. In that short period, the script includes a bizarre group of actors dressed up as the famous  Russian writers Tolstoy, Gogol, and Dostoyevsky, who evidently know little of the writings of these worthies they represent and mouth inane praises of current political views that are opposite of what those writers had stood for.  The script includes a suicide of an intellectual, black marketing of books, and a sequence where Dovlatov pretends to be a government official arm-twisting the black-market bookseller to divulge the names of the buyers “who are enemies of the state.” While it is humorous to the viewer, the bookseller is none the wiser.  During that short period, the viewer gets a glimpse of how the official book publishers/censors function, how dissidents are picked up by secret police in open restaurants and even an event in a prison camp that Dovlatov witnesses. There is also Dovlatov separated from his wife due to his financial situation and teetering on the edge of divorce proceedings and doting on his loving daughter for whom he hopes to procure a German (a reference to the director’s name, perhaps?) doll from the black market.

Doting father Dovlatov and daughter. The bag contains
yet another rejected manuscript.

An "enemy of the State"  picked up by the police in public while eating a meal

The film Dovlatov has two contrarian aspects: the moody, depressive world of artists who cannot find freedom of expression and the hilarious, wry comedy that involves names of writers and contents of their works contrasted with live realistic situations in 1971 Leningrad.  The soulful, contemplative world is captured visually with fog and snow (the cinematographer is the talented Lukasz Zal of Cold War, Ida, and Loving Vincent fame) and visual compositions of soldiers marching by as a dejected Dovlatov walks by staring at his bleak future while refusing to compromise on the content of his writings with the demands of the State.  The acerbic comedy alternately lifts up the viewer (assuming of course that the viewer is well acquainted with literature).  When a woman is attracted to Dovlatov, who appears to be single, he introduces himself as Franz Kafka and the lady does not blink an eyelid! (The film audience in which I was seated did not react either!)

"Franz Kafka" interacts with one of his many lady admirers

There is a major problem with Dovlatov, the film. The screenplay will only make sense if the viewer is well-exposed to European literature. Brodsky would be another Russian name to many who watch the film, unless they were aware that Dovlatov’s friend went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature soon after he immigrated to USA.

This critic too has yet to read Dovlatov’s famous books The Suitcase: a novel and Pushkin Hills (published long after Dovlatov followed Brodsky and immigrated to USA) but had been  lucky to have read a couple of Dovlatov’s written pieces in English  in the New Yorker magazine published in the 80s. American author Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, had praised some of those New Yorker pieces written by Dovlatov . Hopefully the lovely film Dovlatov will prod some viewers to make an effort to read those books and articles in the New Yorker and discover the brilliance of written works. If Russians today idolize him the way Americans idolize Elvis Presley the singer, Dovlatov’s writings must be exceptional.

Dovlatov (back to the camera) is a witness to an escape attempt
at a forced labour camp

There are several praiseworthy aspects to the film. One of those is the ability of script to compact the stifling atmosphere of censorship and its effect on creative people’s lives using Dovlatov, the writer, as a prime example. When Dovlatov encounters an actress dressed as Natasha Rostova (the main female character in Tolstoy’s War and Peace) Dovlatov comments dryly to her “You are very real. And better,” alluding to the state of the character towards the end of the novel.  What Dovlatov acerbically implies here in the script will only make sense to those familiar with the state of the character towards the end in Tolstoy’s novel. The film deserved recognition for its screenplay by film combines talents of Russia, Serbia and Poland.

Manuscripts/pages of books on the floor: a seminal shot of the film,
with Dovlatov dolefully inspecting one of the sheets 

It is sad that this film attracted barely 30 odd viewers at its screening during the International Film Festival of Kerala in Trivandrum (in contrast to other films at the festival that attracted large audiences) and that motley crowd evidently did not react to the humour offered by the script, possibly because they were not familiar with Russian and European literature. While Dovlatov, the film, might not appear as obviously politically critical of Russia as German, Jr.'s earlier work Under Electric Clouds (2015), the former is a more mature work, assuming of course the viewer is able to pick up the subtleties of the film. This critic is confident that Dovlatov, the film, will gain recognition with time and that in turn will lead more people to read the writings of the author Dovlatov.

In the Sight and Soundinterview director Aleksei German, Jr., makes it clear that though the film is obviously critical of the Brezhnev regime, he had full support from the current government officials in Russia.

P.S. Dovlatov is one of the top 10 films of 2018 for the author.

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229. The late Chinese director Bo Hu’s debut and final film “Da xiang xi die er zuo ” (An Elephant Sitting Still) (2018) (China): A realistic film on the lives of the marginal urban population in China, a perspective rarely presented to foreigners, based on a novel written by the director

It is not easy to sit through any feature film that is nearly 4 hours long; more so if the characters in the film are dour, unexceptional, and behave like the dregs of society. An Elephant Sitting Stillwould challenge the average viewer to keep on watching the principal characters whose actions are abhorrent, whose views are negative, and whose reactions are slow. What keeps the fatigued viewer to persist in watching the long film is the unusual subject revealed in the initial few minutes of the film: an elephant that is sitting still in a city in China as part of a circus but eats the food offered to it. You keep watching the film trying to figure out the connection between the host of anti-heroes in the film and the elephant—which becomes clear only in the final sequence of the film. (The film is on show at the Denver Film Festival)

Two school kids, Bu and Ling, meet at a monkey-feeding cage,
where the monkeys keep a low profile

An Elephant Sitting Still belongs to a wave of Chinese films (e.g., Jia Zhang-ke’s  A Touch of Sin) in recent years  that deals with the lopsided growth of the Chinese economy which leads to isolated violent actions by those who feel  deprived of any hope for a change in their life, however much they aspire and dream for a better deal . The temperament of the film is nihilistic to the core—wives cheat on their husbands; friends betray friends; sons value their offspring more than their parents; dogs run off from their caring human families and seek refuge with strangers; teachers/deans have sex with their students; grown-up men kill dogs that have done them no harm; touts sell fake railway tickets; when you possess valid rail tickets, the  trains get cancelled; people burn garbage in the open, close to tall, residential buildings; violent acts in schools are not reported to the police as the consequences are worse... The list goes on. It is the myth of the Sisyphus—trying to climb a mountain that you will never be able surmount.

“I don’t like anybody. The world is quite disgusting. They are afraid of you, if you kill.”--Words of a schoolboy in the film after shooting a thug and before committing suicide

Exploited school girl Ling turns violent 

It is not surprising that the director Bo Hu committed suicide soon after completing his debut film and the publishing of his novel on which the film is based. The film "reads" like a suicide note.

Bo Hu had written the original script of the film based on his own book Huge Crack  (written under his pen name Hu Qian and published in 2017, a year before the film was made) evidently noticing the myriad problems of the lower middle class in modern day China. A well-meaning bright student has to deal with bullies in school and parents who do not encourage or appreciate him at home. Most young people look at their parents for inspiration; but what can you do, when you find out that one of your parents was caught taking bribes? The late Bo Hu had studied filmmaking and this debut magnum opus seems to have been stuffed with his perceptions of things wrong in his world in the 29 years that he lived on this planet.

Dogs seek shelter with strangers like Wang (above): not expecting
strange behaviour from them

In the film An Elephant Sitting Still there are two suicides, a killing of a dog, a mortal accident caused by a push, and several killings of human beings by individuals driven to the edge of despair. The varied age groups involved in the bleak and dark narrative range from teenage school kids, to young men and women starting their lives by investing in an apartment, an elderly man being pushed into a retirement home where even retired army generals are not happy, and an elderly grandmother lying dead in her tenement because her family does not visit her.

“If you are standing on a tall building’s balcony, what would come to your head?"
--Words spoken by a thug, Chen, whose best friend jumped off a tall building’s balcony

 

“I would think what else can I do?” --Response from a school kid Bu, who has unintentionally killed Chen's brother (who in turn was bullying him) by pushing him backwards at the top of the stairs of his school, echoing the very advice given to Chen earlier by the woman he loves

The importance of the film rests solely on Bo Hu’s intentions to discuss the social problems of China today without making it look like an overt criticism of the Government. It is clearly inferred in the film that the police is more feared rather than serving as a source of protection from evil forces. The people who kill are mostly aware that the law will ultimately catch up with them. But An Elephant Sitting Still is not a film that deals with the wages of killing; it is a film that wonders if there is a way out of this juggernaut of negative socio-political matrix for someone who wants to live a new life, turn a new page, irrespective of their physical age.  It is a film of people who wonder “what else they can do. “

So who are trying to witness the strange elephant with an unusual behaviour? A retired man with his school-going granddaughter and two teenage school kids, possibly in love, with human blood on their hands make their pilgrimage to the metaphorical elephant that eats without moving. Any intelligent viewer will grasp what the pachyderm stands for.  Nietzsche would have smiled at this film, if he was alive. Perhaps so would have Soren Kierkegaard (recalling his concepts of 'levelling' when compared to the gradual leveling of the hubris of the alpha-male Cheng in An Elephant Sitting Still) and the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev in finding a soulmate in Bo Hu. It is not the film that is important, it is what the film tries to communicate to the viewer that is important.

P.S. The film won the FIPRESCI award at the Berlin Film Festival and a special mention for a debut film at the festival. At Taiwan's Golden Horse Film Festival, the film won the Golden Horse for the Best Feature film, Best Screenplay Award, and the Audience award. The film is one of the top 20 films of 2018 for the author.

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216. Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi’s film “Teströl és lélekröl” (On Body and Soul) (2017) (Hungary) based on her original screenplay: A stunning script involving dreams and matching dreamlike cinematography bring Hungarian cinema back to the heights it had climbed several decades ago.

 “Teströl és lélekröl  (On Body and Soul) is an idiosyncratic love story full of lyricism and humour, free of all social conventions. It impresses us with the subtlety and eloquence of its style and involves us in its joy of living and loving.” 

--- The citation for the FIPRESCI prize bestowed at the Berlin Film Festival

Hungarian cinema touched its zenith in the Seventies and Eighties when a group of remarkable Hungarian directors delivered their best works: Zoltan Fabri, Istvan Szabo, Miklos Jansco, Istvan Gaal, Karoly Makk, and Marta Meszaros—in that order.  Then there was a lull for several decades while the director Bela Tarr briefly captured the imagination of a new generation of filmgoers of the Nineties and at the turn of this century. Now in 2017, Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi brings back to the floundering Hungarian cinema the power of yore.

Just as Zoltan Fabri’s brilliant The Fifth Seal offered food for thought as few films do, director Ildikó Enyedi presents in On Body and Soul a range of philosophical thoughts captured through near silent sequences that discusses issues pertaining to the human body and soul---often presenting contrasting ethereal natural behaviour of animals in the forest with the bloody horror of an abattoir for another set of animals.  

The stag and the doe--arresting award-winning cinematography of Mate Herbai

On Body and Soul is not about animals—it is about us, human beings.  The main plot is an unusual love story of a physically unattractive old cripple falling in love with an emotionally crippled beautiful woman half his age. Director and scriptwriter Enyedi evidently loves to study body and soul in many facets of everyday life, not just limited to the world of a Hungarian abattoir.  If one looks at the subjects the film present, they could present obvious metaphors for larger geographies.  

Enyedi chose Hungarian cinematographer Máté Herbai (who has primarily worked with the little- known but not insignificant Hungarian director Atilla Gigor) to bring magic to her feature film made after a significant 18 year hiatus from making regular feature films, just as Terrence Malick took a 20 year break  between Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line. Enyedi’s last feature film was Simon the Magician (1999) that won awards worldwide following her 1989 Cannes winner My Twentieth Century. Now, Herbai (under directions of Enyedi) ,captures intimate  images of a stag with antlers in the company of a doe in a snowy forest.  There is no copulation on screen but the animals are evidently attracted to each other.  The film sequences seem to talk to the viewer.  That’s the first chapter of the “soul” in the film.

The lead characters go home after work separately
until their separate dreams bring them together

Enyedi and Herbai follow up with a contrapuntal sequence also bereft of music. This is of cattle waiting quietly before they are slaughtered. Herbai captures the eyes of the bull which seems to anticipate its fate as it looks through its cage at the slaughterhouse workers as they casually chat before they begin their day’s work. Both the lady janitor and the bull looks up at the sun tying up humans and animals in a cosmic silent gesture.  Enyedi and Herbai do not show the actual slaughter—only the preparation and the aftermath. Yet, the sequence is chilling and yet aesthetically rendered.

The filmmakers state in the end-credits that no animal was killed specifically for the film but they merely recorded an actual event in the abattoir.  That’s the second “chapter” of the film that gradually moves from the “soul” to the “body,” from the shots of the live animal to its dead body as prime beef portions. This sequence is not for the queasy animal lovers in the audience but yet it is aesthetically presented as few filmmakers can.

The CFO (Morcsanyi) watches his new Quality Inspector (Borbely) at work

As the film progresses, the viewer realizes Enyedi has merely introduced us to the human soul and body in the main plot of the film bringing to the fore the human stag and the human doe, connected through dreams.  While scientifically much of Enyedi’s imaginative tale can be pooh-poohed, the tale is extraordinary.  It is the unusualness of the situation that grabs the viewer. We are presented a man who is a cripple, who once had an active sex life, and now has a grown up daughter, suddenly taking an interest in a reclusive new worker in the abattoir, where he is the influential Chief Financial Officer (CFO).  Enyedi ‘s and Herbai’s initial visual introduction of the lady is superb: she is standing outside the building alone, while others are chatting in groups.  She retreats into the shadows when she realizes her legs are being burnt by the sun’s rays.  Enyedi develops her character as one who is very smart—one who can figure out likely conversations between people without hearing them, a person who can recall dates of incidents in her life perfectly unlike most of us, a person who takes her job seriously and professionally. Even her plate of food is carefully placed to geometric alignment. (Oh, Enyedi, how I admire the lovely details of your script!) And she is naive about sex (and music) even though men are attracted towards her but is evidently interested in experiencing it.

Enyedi does the same with the human “stag.” He once had a fair share of women in his life. The CFO still has a glad eye for sexy women that comes in his view but has grown up sufficiently to apologize profusely when he caught staring. Unlike the human doe who believes in rules, the CFO knows how to keep the local police chief happy by presenting him choice portions of beef. Unlike the human doe, the human stag has no problems meeting up with strangers. They are contrasting characters

What brings the opposites together?   Dreams. Sigmund Freud would have laughed at the amazing proposition of Enyedi’s film but even the stodgiest detractor will have to agree the improbable scenario presented in the film could happen. After all, it is a reworking of the Beauty and the Beast tale, cleverly packaged.

Separate bedrooms in a split screen. Both characters look forward to their dreams
as they prepare to sleep

The film is not just Enyedi and Herbai. The lead male role of Endre, the CFO, is played by a nonprofessional actor, Geza Morcsanyi, who in real life is a successful publisher of Hungarian books, has never acted in a film before and may not in the future.  However, he does edit film scripts and has written one screenplay. The female lead, Maria, is played by Alexandra Borbely, who has acted in a couple of feature films. The lead actors are very convincing.

Geza Morcsanyi plays the CFO

The film introduced this film critic to the wonderful voice, songs and lyrics of British folk singer Laura Marling whose song “What he wrote” wraps up the film. The lyrics of the song do not tie up with the story of the film. My guess is that scriptwriter/director Enyedi merely introduced Marling to the viewers as an extension of the sequence where music store owner suggests a CD  as good music to the character Maria who cannot make up her own mind on what music CD to buy and ends up buying the suggested disc.

Enyedi’s film is one of the best films of 2017. What is amusing is how a lady scriptwriter is able to create the minor characters—the sex obsessed male workers, the amusing psychologist, and the side plot of a worker stealing sex stimulants for human consumption that was meant for animals about to be butchered.  The film is Hungary’s submission for the Best Foreign Film category at the 2017 Oscars.  A formidable one indeed! Hungarian cinema is back at the top.

P.S. The film On Body and Soul won four awards and honours at the Berlin Film Festival: The Golden Bear award for the best film of the year; the FIPRESCI Prize; the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury; and the Prize of the Reader Jury of the daily Berliner Morgenpost . It also won the prestigious 2017 Cameraimage Award for its cinematography by Mate Herbai and the top award at the Sydney film festival. It also won the audience award at the Mumbai film festival. Hungarian director Zoltan Fabri’s The Fifth Seal (1976) and Terrence Malick's  Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line have been reviewed earlier on this blog. (Click on the names of the films in this post script to access those reviews.)

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194. Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s Farsi/Persian language film “Taxi” (2015), based on his own original screenplay: Very interesting subject but intriguing cinematic docu-fiction.

The difficult Kafkaesque conditions for the intellectuals and the financially insecure in Iran discussed in Taxi are indeed very real.

I have visited Iran several times and therefore I have seen it all first-hand. You do not encounter beggars but it is only natural that economically weak families exist in Iran.  In the film Taxi, too, you don’t see beggars but there is a conversation about Iranians being publicly hanged for petty crimes and of a husband-wife duo wearing masks taking to mugging of their richer neighbours because of their pecuniary compulsions. The film ends with thieves/plain-clothed policemen on a motorbike ransacking the “taxi’s” cameras.

Anyone who criticizes the Iranian government is perceived to be a foreign spy and brutally interrogated, while blindfolded, in notorious prisons.  In his film Taxi, the director Jafar Panahi claims that he himself underwent a similar situation and that he is still hoping to one day identify his interrogator by his voice. In the movie Taxi, the Iranian prisons are referred to tongue-in-cheek as “Paradise” by a famous Iranian human rights lawyer, Ms Nasrin Satoudeh (the flower woman), who travels in the Panahi driven “taxi.” She explains that once you are released from prison, your neighbours and friends treat you so differently that you wish you were back in prison. She would know because she was there herself. Ms Satoudeh has represented prisoners and political activists. Her impressive list of clients includes the Nobel Prize winner Shirin Ebadi. 

Director Panahi drives his taxi in Teharan's streets with a camera on the dashboard,
while a pirated CD hawker engages him in a conversation on films

Everything discussed in the movie is real. My heart goes out to the people of Iran where the best works of Iranian cinema are banned and good foreign cinema rarely shown. My favourite Iranian film Bitter Dreams, a 2004 debut feature film by Mohsen Amiryousefi, was banned within months of it being shown at the Cannes film festival and awarded the Camera d’Or (the award for best cinematography) and subsequently most cineastes are not even aware of that path-breaking film’s existence or the unique capability of the young director.

Now Panahi is different. He makes very interesting films. He claims he is hounded by the Iranian authorities but yet continues to make films, one after the other, openly on the streets of Teheran. It cannot be that he has accomplished it without people noticing his filming activities in public areas. Iran is a nation, which has lots of cops in civilian clothes and a slice of its population is ever ready to report on activities that would please the government machinery.

Now Taxi is a laudable work--including a discussion of males wearing ties in public (I have not spotted a single Iranian male wearing a necktie in Teheran, but two people in Taxi wear ties, Panahi's friend who has been mugged and a just-married bridegroom), the human rights lawyer  Ms Satoudeh (the flower woman) referring to prison tales after she herself was an inmate of the notorious Evin prison,  pirated film CDs of American, Japanese  and Turkish films being hawked surreptitiously  on the streets of Teheran--all laudable, realistic cinema.

Or is it? In Taxi, the taxi driver Panahi is concerned that his two women passengers with a fishbowl will wet his backseat. When the fishbowl does break by accident, Panahi is not concerned about the water or the broken glass. The camera angles of the sequence with him helping the ladies saving the lives of the fish could not have been taken from the dashboard camera. Evidently there were more cameras (and camera persons) used than we are expected to believe.

Two women with a glass fish-bowl enter the taxi.
Where is the camera? If it is positioned outside the vehicle,
were there regular cinematographers at work?

We are supposed to believe Panahi’s friend who was mugged has captured electronically some evidence of that event on his electronic notebook that he shares with Panahi, the contents of which we don’t get to see. We just see Panahi’s expressions while viewing it.  Are we expected to conjecture the mugging was caught on camera? Further, are we expected to believe Ms Satoudeh and Mr Panahi could drive around Teheran without raising suspicions of a film being made, when Panahi was banned from making films in Iran?

I have actually shaken hands with the director in my city when he was chairing a film jury. He appeared sullen and unfriendly. In the movie Taxi, you see a charming, ever-smiling and friendly Panahi. Which is the real Panahi? In my opinion, the Berlin film festival ought to have bestowed the Best Actor award for this film not just the Best Film!

Candid videoography by Panahi's niece taken within the taxi (She was present in Berlin
 to pick up the Golden Bear on behalf of her uncle)

As in Panahi's The Circle (2000), the subject of Panahi’s film is totally laudable once again in Taxi. But is there an implicit collusion between Panahi and the Iranian authorities? How much of Taxi is spontaneous? Probably nothing.  Panahi, who was not allowed to make a film by the Iranian government, makes a film (or several films critical of the state of affairs in the country) and gets away with them.  Panahi’s niece captures on camera a rag picker picking up some cash dropped by a newly-wed groom.  Are we to believe that photographic evidence will go unpunished in Iran, however trivial it is?  Now that is intriguing.

P.S. The film won the Golden Bear at the 2015 Berlin film festival and the audience award at the Mumbai international film festival.  Amiryousefi’s Bitter Dreams (2004) and Panahi’s The Circle (2000) are discussed on this blog. Other reviews of several important  Iranian films (and those co-financed by Iran) on this blog can be found by clicking here. However, the film Taxi is built on the ideas first introduced by Abbas Kiarostami in his earlier film Ten (2002).

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