Drives with a view

My 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.

Shelf Life: Stitching the Past into the Future

 My Shelf Life column for November 2020:

What wartime women's fashion can tell us about the world

 

                  Christian Dior's 'New Look' was a massive departure from the clothes women wore in war-torn Europe
 

Elizabeth Gilbert's chatty doorstopper of a novel, City of Girls (2019), begins in the summer of 1940, when the narrator arrives in New York, “nineteen years old and an idiot”. Vivian Morris has just dropped out of Vassar College, judging as dull both the revolutionary young women in “serious black trousers” and the academic girls in shapeless wool skirts “that looked as if they had been constructed out of old sweaters”. While she knows nothing about the world, she knows clothes. And what makes the fashionable teenaged protagonist of 1940 different from one in 2020 is this: Vivian doesn't only wear cool clothes, she can make them.

Trained to sew by an exacting grandmother, Gilbert’s excitable heroine soon finds herself designing costumes the doddering theatre owned by her aunt Peg. It is wartime, and the Lily Playhouse is barely kept afloat by formulaic musicals: there’s really no budget for clothes. But the actors constantly need new outfits, so Vivian learns to improvise. She scours New York's cheaper garment districts and discovers the used clothes shops on Ninth Avenue, becoming a regular at a grand old shop called Lowtsky’s, owned by a Jewish family ejected from eastern Europe.

Vivian becomes adept at digging ancient dresses out of discount bins and transforming them into spectacular customised creations. From showgirls like her friend Celia, she moves on to designing for Edna Parker Watson, grand dame of British theatre stranded in New York by the war. 

 

Gilbert's narratorial preferences can try one’s patience, like addressing her novel to a young woman whose connection to Vivian is kept deliberately mysterious, to anticlimactic effect. But I enjoyed Gilbert’s enjoyment of fashion, a topic she addresses first with girly excitement and then subversive pleasure. The subversion begins with Edna who, though on first names with French couturier Coco Chanel, is no handmaiden to fashion. Her advice on how to dress—“if you dress too much in the style of the moment, it makes you look like a nervous person”, or “I want brilliant dresses, my dear, but I don't want the dress to be the star of the show”—is really advice on how to live.

 

But the book’s real subversion of fashion comes in 1950, when Vivian’s friend Marjorie Lowtksy, sharp young heir to the Lowtsky Emporium, comes up with a plan to cater to the post-war marriage boom. “[We] both know that the old silk and satin is better than anything that's being imported...” says Marjorie. “I can find old silk and satin all over town–hell, I can even buy it in bulk from France, they’re selling everything right now, they’re so hungry over there–and you can use that material to make gowns that are finer than anything at Bonwit Teller.” 

 

The USP? Their dresses “wouldn't be industry; they would be custom tailored”.

Vivian and Marjorie's business makes them rich.

The same era seen from across the Atlantic, in Eric Newby's drily hilarious memoir Something Wholesale: My Life and Times in the Rag Trade (1962) reveals a much more damaged continent. The family firm of Lane and Newby, begun by the writer’s father in the 1890s, is somehow carrying on against a backdrop of bombed-out cities and drastic rationing. Even the upper workrooms of its grand old London offices, writes Newby with brilliant British understatement, “went up in smoke in 1944”.

In some deep metaphorical way, the firm’s continuance into a post-war world now rests increasingly on an army of “outworkers”, elderly women in the suburbs. Meanwhile, their buyers still make orders conditional on unprofitable “Specials”: customised versions for women too misshapen or too snooty to wear the standard designs.

Like Europe itself, the continent's fashion business feels like a creaky old warhorse that can't figure out the new world. “Evening dresses, like the gatherings at which they were intended to be worn, were dispirited”, writes Newby. “[T]he world of fashion had ground to a standstill”. Young Newby tries to come up with new designs on his own. But just after he places his orders, in March 1947, the French designer Christian Dior shows the insanely feminine excesses of his new collection: what would make history as the New Look.

But at that moment, Newby’s creaking world isn’t quite ready. “It was thought to be absurd... a last despairing death-kick by Paris which was no longer to be the centre of the fashion world.” British wholesaler manufacturers, “[h]alf-throttled by clothes rationing”, and too afraid to implement Dior’s radical changes, just make what they have been making for seven years “with a slightly longer skirt”. Of course, nothing sells. The glossies for 1947 are filled with suggestions for women readers with wartime budget constraints, on how to drastically cut and reshape their old clothes.

European fashion, led by Dior’s bold move, slowly begins to recover. But where Europe can only move on by cutting away from its past, America—at least in Gilbert's telling—is already making money off it: repackaging the dead European past as nostalgia. The difference between alteration tailor and vintage couture is writ large onto the history of the world.

Published in The Voice of Fashion, 19 Nov 2020.