Recensioni de* critic*

Panahi continues his fugitive cinema, now five years and three movies into his 20-year ban, with results that remain inventive and altogether inspiring... What Panahi creates is an act of defiance at its most affable and subtly provocative, where the camera as an object is given a deeply meaningful sense of physicality. What happens to this object, then, is a twist that resonates like a cruel violation.

Good to see [Panahi] going back to people - his best subject - after the dead-end introspection of Closed Curtain, good to see him in high spirits generally, though the film is in no way 'real' (it's clearly staged, incl. camera angles that couldn't have come from that dashboard-cam) and is also quite didactic behind the good humour, almost every encounter turning into a discussion of sexism, racism, capital punishment or Islamic strictures on movie-making.

Taxi has a grand sense of humour. It rather lovingly suggests that crime and punishment are relative terms; one man's serious offence is another woman's slap on the wrist. What's clear, though, is that the cinema can help clarify these gradations when examined by artists that still see hope in human nature and art itself.

In encompassing such direct criticism of the state security apparatus, this is a courageously forthright offering from a filmmaker already facing the possibility of jail, yet ultimately it's aimed at a younger generation of Iranians. Panahi is addressing those coming of age at a time when ease of access to digital image technology makes it doubly important for them to look beyond the ideological parameters being set out before them.

...These incidents raise the question of what makes Panahi special when technology permits anyone to become a filmmaker, though the answer lies in the very nature of Taxi. Panahi looks for new perspectives everywhere he goes—note how he engages all his passengers in serious conversation, as though preparing them for roles—and this search reflects his unwavering devotion to cinema, which has the power to transmit those perspectives to the world.

For the casual arthouse viewer, Taxi Tehran has a bit of a paradox to contend with: on one level it feels like a joshing and accessible entry-point into Panahi's work, but it also depends for so much of its effect on these sly nods and homages... It works best as a reminder of everything Panahi wants to say as his curfew nears its close – the services, like the proprietor of a lit cab in the city centre, he's still restlessly eager to give us.

Oppression has transformed Panahi's art. Under the pressure of circumstances, he has turned from a classicist into a modernist, while at the same time transforming the very codes and tones of his frame-breaking aesthetic. He puts his own life into his film as an existential act of self-assertion against his effacement by the regime. Panahi turns the kind of reflexive cinema that, in the United States, would risk critical dismissal as narcissistic into a furious act of political defiance.

Is the correct title for Iranian director Jafar Panahi's latest film just Taxi, or Jafar Panahi's Taxi? That ambiguity speaks to the movie's beguiling, quietly revolutionary nature. On one level, this is a film about Panahi driving a taxi — which may not sound like much, but feels like an act of civil disobedience when you consider the fact that his last two, This is Not a Film and Closed Curtain, were made under house arrest.

The weird intermediate state of things is perhaps meant to keep the viewer off balance, but the resultant experience is more frustrating than beguiling or provocative... [Certain] chilling moments underscore the unusual fact that whatever I might have gotten out of "Taxi" from the perspective of my own enlightenment and/or enjoyment, it's nevertheless a film that on a very crucial level needs to exist.

The simple conceit initially gives the impression that Taxi is a documentary, before one overly staged vignette breaks that illusion. Despite the fact that it's all orchestrated, though, the film feels as spontaneous and digressive as a Charles Mingus composition, and just as paradoxically light and dense.

Ever the resourceful prisoner, Jafar Panahi has managed to make a journey film without leaving the streets of Tehran. Taxi is an expansive road-trip movie in the best tradition of the genre, even though by necessity it travels in circles... Instead of throwing up his hands in the face of government control, Panahi has brightened. About ten minutes into Taxi, there is a shot of Panahi broadly smiling, and such a simple gesture is awe-inspiring.

That the director of such teeming, expansive works as The Circle (2000) and Offside (2006) should find himself limited to the confines of a car may seem lamentable, but Taxi has illustrious cab-bound ancestors, most obviously Ten (2002) by Panahi's mentor, Abbas Kiarostami, as well as Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth (1991). And with the intrepid Panahi in the driver's seat as both novice cabbie and veteran filmmaker, spatial restrictions predictably provide ample opportunity for formal innovation.