Drives with a View - III

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Continuing our series on films about cabbies, we look at why Paul Schrader and Martin Scorsese's 1976 creation, Travis Bickle, seems so eerily prescient today

Halfway through Martin Scorsese's 1976 neo-noir classic Taxi Driver, we hear a campaign speech from a US Presidential candidate. “Walt Whitman, the great American poet, said, ‘I am the man, I suffered, I was there’,” intones the fictitious Charles Palantine. “No more will we fight the wars of the few through the hearts of the many....” Palantine's words, like most dialogue in Paul Schrader's much-mythified script, speak to -- as well as for -- the film's cabdriver hero, Robert De Niro in a career-making performance as the disturbed Vietnam veteran Travis Bickle.

Unlike Palantine and Bickle, Whitman was real. His poem 'Heroes' -- appropriately chosen by Schrader – was written in the voice of the soldier-as-everyman. “Agonies are one of my changes of garments./ I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person,/ My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe...”

Other than this, Schrader's script isn't what one might call poetic. Taxi Driver is a New York film through and through, capturing the city in all its brutal, wry, laconic glory. Unlike many taxi drivers previously discussed in this column series, a cab ride with Travis Bickle rarely involves hearing his voice. Much of Scorsese's masterful tension is based on shots of De Niro's drawn, suspicious face framed in the rearview mirror as he listens to his fellow citizens in the seat behind him – and judges them harshly.

As a cab driver, Bickle is the perfect witness to the world around him. But he does not wish to be a mere witness. He sees the city as “an open sewer full of filth and scum”, a mess that needs to be cleaned up. The post-60s and pre-Giuliani New York of the film is riding high on a wave of freely available sex and drugs, and our hero wishes someone would rein it in. He wants to save it from itself. In one memorable scene, the wannabe Presidential candidate rides Bickle's taxi. When Bickle recognises him, he tells Palantine the city's dirt/immorality needs to be “flushed down the toilet” by whoever comes to power.

“Let me tell you something,” Palantine says earlier, “I have learnt more about America from travelling in taxicabs than in all the limos in the country.” The surround-sound of the campaign lets the film unfold against the backdrop of Palantine's catch-all slogan ‘We are the people’. 

Watching Taxi Driver in 2020 feels strangely prescient: Bickle appears as an early representation of a figure that has come to dominate post-Trump American political discourse; the White everyman who thinks of the country as having gone to the dogs and himself as the morally-superior saviour. As Bickle becomes increasingly unhinged, his monologues in the mirror – bookended by the famous “You talking to me?” line – refer to himself as a hero in the making: “a man who would not take it any more... someone who stood up against the filth”.

Travis Bickle is, in fact, a precursor to much else in the American nightmare of the late 20th and early 21^st century – a mentally ill man gripped by perpetual insomnia; whose sense of anomie and aimlessness leads him to gun violence. If politicians don't seem to want to 'clean up' society, he'll do it himself. But the subtext of what Bickle thinks needs to be 'fixed' is both racist and male chauvinist (though not uncomplicatedly). Meeting a White passenger who wants to murder the wife cheating on him with a “nigger” is followed by Bickle acquiring weapons – from a preppie, White, gun dealer who chooses Bickle over “a jungle bunny in Harlem” because he only deals “high-quality goods to the right people”. Bickle first uses the gun on a Black man who's amateurishly robbing his local cornershop. In one of the film's grimmest scenes, the unfazed Italian shop-owner waves Bickle off and says he'll take care of it. He then takes an iron rod to the thief's body, shouting “The fifth motherfucker this year!”

Another remarkable subplot reveals Bickle's deeply-conflicted relationship with sex and women. The same man who complains about the city's filth – this is a Central New York full of sex shows and prostitution – takes his pristine, almost prissy, date to watch a faux-instructional Swedish porn film. When she proceeds to shut him out afterwards, his interior monologue becomes bizarre and incel-ish: “I realise now how much she's just like the others, cold and distant. And many people are like that. Women for sure. They're like a union.”

The other subplot about sex is Bickle's violent rescuing of Jodie Foster's underage sex worker – a plotline echoed in Schrader's self-directed film Hardcore (1979), in which a young girl runs away from a religious suburban family to become a porn actress, and goes back home in a strangely unconvincing last scene, like Foster's Iris.

What is truly disturbing about Taxi Driver's end, though, is that he is feted for murder. Violence, when committed against 'immoral' people, it seems, makes you a hero. That once-fictional battlefield seems eerily closer to today's reality.

 Published in Mumbai Mirror, 27 Dec 2020.

Drives with a view - II

My Mirror column:

Two Iranian films -  Jafar Panahi's 2015 Taxi Tehran and Abbas Kiarostami's 2002 Ten - use the taxi ride as a space for confession, comment and confrontation.

Early in Jafar Panahi’s 2015 Iranian docufiction Taxi Tehran, two passengers in a taxi get into an argument about the death penalty. “If they hang two people, the others would see,” says the man in favour. The woman argues against, saying that people mustn’t be hanged for such minor crimes committed out of need. “After China, we have the most executions in the world,” she points out. The more coherently the woman argues, though, the more rudely the man jeers at her. “You don't know jackshit,” he says at one point, accusing her of living in a world of fiction because she is a teacher – someone who he thinks reads too many books and spends her days with children.

Children in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema, of course, have been the chosen carriers of filmic truth – especially in Panahi’s own film career, right from his 1995 debut The White Balloon and his 1997 feature The Mirror (which shares with Taxi Tehran the docufiction device of having an actor engage in conversations with real people). Taxi Tehran also contains a precociously sharp child – the director’s niece, who films everything on her mobile camera. Between showing us the articulate female passenger and the whipsmart little girl, it’s more than clear that Panahi intends us to laugh at the man’s words.

But the car is, in Taxi Tehran, very much a space of dialogue; a place where unusual exchanges can take place. Taxi Tehran was the third film Panahi shot illegally after the Iranian state banned him from making films, and it won him the Silver Bear at the 2015 Berlin Film Festival. In the film Panahi turns his vehicle into a faux-taxi, picking up strangers, family members and acquaintances from all over the city and dropping them off at their destinations. Except we learn soon enough that some of these exchanges are staged – and in the finest Panahi tradition, it’s often difficult to say which ones.

The film is strewn with references to the ubiquity of the camera in our lives. From the niece who wants to make a film in a month and has already recorded a real-life crisis in the lives of some acquaintances, to the neighbour who brings Panahi footage from a security camera to describe something terrible that happened to him, to the state placing a political prisoner's visiting mother in a room with cameras, life seems increasingly something that unfolds on screen rather than off it.

But Taxi Tehran feels like an update on an older Iranian film which was also set entirely inside a car driven by one person – Abbas Kiarostami's Ten (2002). In the unforgettable first segment of that Palm d'Or-nominated film, a young boy shouts at his divorced mother for a long length of time as she drives him through the city. We don’t see the driver – played by the actress Mania Akbari – for the first few minutes, instead experiencing the claustrophobia inside the car build with the child’s terrifyingly adult remarks. “That makes three sentences and they’re all rubbish,” he shouts, or “I can't live with you because you are a selfish woman,” or “You'll never know how to talk and you’ll never be anything” - all of which make it seem like he is ventriloquising his father, from whom she has got a divorce. The boy constantly instructs his mother to “say it calmly” or “don't shout in the street”, while himself plugging his ears against her voice and yelling louder to drown her out.

Like in Taxi Tehran and in the two films about taxis that I discussed last week (World Taxi and Night on Earth), the car in Ten is an unspoken site of confession. Or sometimes, a refuge. When the driver’s seven-year-old complains that she starts talking as soon as they get in the car, she retorts unselfconsciously that there’s no privacy at home – the home she shares with the new husband she's so happy to have acquired.

Driving around the city seems to allow for long, frank exchanges, even with women passengers she doesn't know well. A sex worker whose face we never see insists that wives are also in a kind of trade with their husbands. “You’re the wholesalers, we’re the retailers,” she scoffs. Another woman who has lost a fiancé to a rival contender talks of another kind of exchange, the one we conduct with God. “Before, praying seemed ridiculous,” she says softly. “I used to say, you pray to force God to give you things.” But both she and the car’s driver now find themselves deriving a semblance of peace from their visits to a mausoleum.

If the content of Ten’s conversations reveals a society politically and legally skewed against woman, the form, too, has something to offer. Male drivers often block Akbari’s path, she has to keep demanding right of way. So there’s some quiet courage to be drawn from the penultimate segment in which her young son returns, and inquires about first and fifth gears. If he thinks his mother can teach him about driving, perhaps that’s not a bad start.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 13 Dec 2020.

Drives with a view

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Two films set in taxis -- one a 2019 documentary, the other a cult classic from thirty years ago -- offer a great ride through a bumpy world.

A still from Philipp Majer's 2019 documentary World Taxi

Films take you travelling; that has always been true. In our Coronavirus era, when real travel is hard to come by, it is even more so -- magnifying the attractions of the road movie. In the ongoing digital edition of the Urban Lens film festival, I watched a documentary called World Taxi that's like five road movie snippets rolled into one. German filmmaker Philipp Majer lets you travel to five cities in five different time zones, each one with a different taxi driver as your guide.

Each segment offers insights into a particular part of the world, but also into the world of cab drivers everywhere.

“Your taxi is like your second wife,” says Tony, who drives a cab in Bangkok, Thailand. “If you don't take care them, they not going to take care you.” Majer doesn't link Tony's metaphorical comment up with it, but Mamadiou – the taxi driver he films in Dakar, Senegal – is actually thinking of getting a second wife. In one incredible sequence, Mamadiou actually mentions this flirtatiously with a carload of female passengers, suggesting that he might be interested in marrying the younger woman present. This leads into a full-fledged discussion, with gendered home truths flying right, left and centre. “If she [the first wife] senses that I am wooing another one, she might come back to normal,” says Mamadiou. “How will she sense it, though?” says one of the older women. “Some men have a bit on the side without the woman noticing.” “Ah, then the woman lacks intuition,” says the younger woman.

Connections also emerge between unexpected countries – like the USA and Kosovo, a much smaller territory that only declared its independence from Serbia in February 2008. Despite the vast gulf in their histories of democracy and economic status, health in both places appears to be a thing that people can't afford to pay for. In recently war-torn Kosovo, cab driver Destan Mjeqiki keeps a file full of newspaper cuttings of natural home remedies as possibilities “for people who don't have money”. Meanwhile, the cab driver Sergio in El Paso, Texas, operates in an economy where middle class people have no health insurance, which means they often go across the border to Mexico to get cheaper medical treatment than they can in their own -- technically much more developed – country.

In an online conversation with Indian documentary filmmaker Shabani Hassanwalia, Majer said that he was trying to make a non-fiction version of Jim Jarmusch's 1991 cult film Night on Earth. Majer's film has plenty of energy, but it's scattered, and feels almost slight in comparison to Jarmusch's. Other than Berlin (which gives us the documentary's only female cab driver, the wonderfully steady Bambi, who must often refuse come-ons from drunken post-clubbers), Majer shoots in places where the economy and politics are on some sort of edge. Jarmusch's film is shot entirely in European and American cities, and in a very different time. Perhaps 1991 felt as unstable as our own times in some ways, but from the distance of three decades it appears marvellously stable. Even the rule-less-ness of that time feels like some quasi-mythical truth: when the New York native persuades his lost immigrant driver to let him drive the cab instead, the driver balks and says it's not allowed. “Yeah, it's allowed,” drawls the passenger. “This is New York!”

And yet this is already a universe filled with immigrants, people forced to live and work in places a world away from where they grew up. Jarmusch's approach isn't overtly political, and it's certainly not woke in any tick-the-boxes sort of way. Instead, his juxtapositions provoke thought. The Black Brooklyn man, for instance, laughs loudly and long at his East German cab driver because he hears his name – Helmut -- as Helmet. “That's like being called Lampshade,” he guffaws. When Helmut asks him his name, it turns out it's YoYo.

Helmut is a clown – he actually worked as a clown in Dresden. But bemused as he is, he has something to teach us about listening. Meanwhile the cab driver who doesn't listen – Roberto Benigni in the Rome segment, which contains the broadest comedy of the five – can literally kill off a passenger.

A still from Jim Jarmusch's 1991 film Night on Earth, with five segments set in five taxis across the world

As anyone who's taken taxis knows, there are drivers who listen, and others who talk. Sometimes, rarely, they do both, turning taxi rides into that unusual intimate thing: a conversation with a stranger.

Jarmusch's brilliantly written set of vignettes starts with sunset in Los Angeles, where a rather surprised older woman (the unmatchable Gena Rowlands) gets into a cab driven by a rather young Winona Ryder, and learns that it's possible to be perfectly, undisturbably happy with your perfectly ordinary life. In Paris, two pompous Cameroonians learn that mocking your taxi driver, even if he has the same colour of skin as you and you address him as your “little brother”, doesn't serve you well. But also in Paris, the taxi driver learns that being blind isn't the same as not seeing. Conversations with strangers always teach you things – usually about yourself.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 6 Dec 2020.