Our only previous experience with films by Jafar Panahi was the impressive but difficult to watch This is Not a Film, notable mainly in how it showcased his determination to continue to make films despite a 20-year ban on such activity imposed by the Iranian authorities.

The film has the director drive around Tehran in his car as a sort of communal taxi, giving him the opportunity to engage with a wide variety of people while cameras in the car records all of the interactions. One early conversation for example involves a woman arguing against a man who proposes capital punishment for petty crimes. On another occasion, he encounters a man and his wife who have been involved in a motorcycle accident and takes them to the hospital. Quite a few of his passengers recognize him, such as a man who apparently make a business out of distributing bootleg movies and a young student trying to be a director himself. Later he picks up his niece, Hana, from her school and she reveals that her teacher has asked her to make a short film as homework and so she films everything around her as well. He also meets with activist lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh and discusses with her the case of Ghoncheh Ghavami who tried to enter a stadium hosting a volleyball match to protest in favor of equal access to sporting events.

Our cinephile friend told us that this film is unscripted and consists of naturally occurring events. However it is pretty evident to us that while it uses non-professional actors, it is indeed carefully scripted and choreographed as the interactions are too dramatic and coherent to be random. The incident with the couple who had an accident for example has the injured man immediately demand that everyone present witness his last will and testament that his wife inherit all of his property in order to prevent his brothers from staking a claim. It’s great drama no doubt but entirely too on the nose to be plausible. Even after conceding that this is indeed a work of fiction, it is still very good cinema. Watching Panahi drive his car around is never boring as each set of characters brings a new story as they come aboard. I also appreciated how the film provides a street-level view of Tehran. Most of us will probably never travel to Iran so it’s fascinating to watch thoroughly mundane stuff like Hana slyly ask for a frappucino or a poor boy scrounge in the dumpster for recyclables.

In addition to the familiar theme of standing up to the oppression of the Iranian government, Taxi Tehran also features the act of filming itself as a recurrent motif. It’s a bit blasé how the bootleg video seller claims that he’s fighting against censorship and culturally enriching Iranians but a more subtle usage is when the injured man resorts to a smartphone video recording to establish his final wishes or when Panahi’s old neighbor asks him out just to show him a video of a crime committed against him. I believe that the intent is to show how films can show the truth of the world around us while Hana’s grousing over the rules that her teacher sets for her homework is meant to show up the government’s ridiculous rules. For example, every film is supposed to have a story with distinct good and bad guys and there are rules governing what the good guys must look like.

I still dislike how the film plays games with how real the events it depicts are. Having characters notice the camera and mocking Panahi that he is still up to his old tricks is really pushing the limits. So is having characters recognize the director and point out analogies to his previous films. It’s one thing if these interactions were truly natural but as they are scripted it feels a little egoistic. Still it’s a relatively minor flaw in what is seemingly a very simple film, but reveals plenty of insights into contemporary Iranian society. I would recommend this title very highly.