The movie’s title lays out its framework. The action is confined to the interior of a taxi in Iran’s capital city of Tehran. The cab’s equipped with a few cameras that can cover the passenger seat, back seat, driver’s seat, and there’s a view out the front windshield as well. And behind the wheel is … guess who? Panahi himself, and it’s heartening to see him here looking relatively cheerful given the depressive and near-despairing states chronicled in his two prior pictures. Right away the movie gets into “the issues” as it were, with one passenger loudly declaiming that hubcap thieves ought to be hanged not as a matter of consistent policy but as a deterrent, insurance that those contemplating such crimes “get the message.” Then this truculent fellow criticizes Panahi’s driving and sense of direction.
Once that fare has been dispatched, another passenger notes that the angry fellow seems to have been enacting a patch of dialogue from Panahi’s “Crimson Gold.” This brings up the question as to whether what we’re watching is a documentary or a series of stages scenes, something that’s never really resolved. 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. The number of fares (or "fares") who recognize Panahi immediately and make knowing comments about his work could be enacting a purposeful strategy of reflexivity … or the whole thing is some kind of misguided exercise in self-aggrandizement. (“The people of cinema can always be relied on,” one fare says to Panahi warmly.)
Near the end, the picture picks up some steam. After a rather reverse-cloying exchange with a niece, Panahi picks up a woman on her way to a prison visit, who delivers a bracing indictment of the country’s penal system and then comments that were her views to appear in a Panahi film, that movie would be banned on the grounds of “sordid realism.” That latter phrase is allowed to settle into the viewer’s consciousness for a little while before a title card informs the audience that the movie’s credits, if there are to be any, need to be approved by the “Ministry of Islamic Guidance.” These 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.
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