Two films burst into the Berlinale
competition like gunslingers shooting from the hip: Jafar Panahi’s Taxi, a seriously comical view about
filmmaking in Iran today, and Victoria,
a riveting long-take tour-de-force crime film set in Berlin, directed by
Sebastian Schipper.
Panahi was banned from making films
in Iran by its Islamic regime after Offside
(2006), his cinema vérité style X-ray of Iranian social affairs played at the
Berlinale – and a staple of my
international cinema course at UCLA. The festival – true to its historical mission
of supporting beleaguered filmmakers around the world – invited him to be a
juror in 2011, but the director was pressured by the Iranian authorities to
decline it. Two years ago the Berlinale
showed Closed Curtain, a companion
piece to his documentary This Is Not a
Film (2011), playing in Cannes. These two films interrogate the act of
filmmaking by a director who is courageous and clever, and is staying in Iran. What negotiations have taken place between
the Ministry of Islamic Guidance, the powers minding the cinematic foreign
affairs of Iran, like the Farabi Foundation, and this director that stubbornly
works on a self-reflexive vein, we do not know.
But the films are here to make the international audience – and
particular our film students – ask questions about the role of cinema, and the
place of the filmmakers in a restricted society, one with ‘movable’ walls
between the public and the private spheres, as Hooman Majd explored in The Ayatollah Begs to Differ (2009).
The press screening of Taxi on the second day of the festival won
the critics over from the start: the point-of-view shot of a camera set on a
pivot inside a taxi, waiting for a green light in a busy intersection. Built on a series of unhurried long takes, the camera tells the story by panning
on the various characters that come in and out of the car, whose driver is … the director himself. He is acknowledged as such by the assorted mix of
characters, young and old, educated or simple, whose conversations and
interactions give us an update on what was discussed in the previous
films. Taxi is the comedy of this trilogy, and so tragicomically funny all
the way to the last shot, that you come out of the film laughing with, not at,
the predicament of the director and his characters. It is a tightly woven piece of writing and
acting, complete with in-your-face references to what it takes to make a
‘distributable’ film in Iran – recited hilariously by the ‘niece’ of the
director; the lure of American pop culture; and the power of images –
especially from iPhones! – to shape the conversation on cultural and political matters. Some characters are unforgettable, like the
pious old ladies who have to reach a spring by noon to throw the fish they are
carrying with them so that they will not die; the misshapen fellow that makes a
living distributing illegal downloads; the sassy niece with a film school project;
the elegant lady lawyer defending political prisoners. The film ends where it began, à la Man with the Movie Camera with the camera
taking a bow, only this time the ‘mechanical eye’ – invisible but palpable - is
ripped off from its pivot by unknown minions, so what we abruptly see at the
end is a black screen. Taxi is also a
wink to Ten (2002), by Abbas
Kiarostami, one of the other great Iranian filmmakers, now living in Paris, who
makes a taxi cabin a metaphorical place to talk about the same things Panahi
explicitly does.
Written and directed by Sebastian
Schipper, born in Hanover in 1968 and initially trained as an actor, Victoria is an exhilarating piece of
filmmaking. The analogy I could think of
was Tom Tykwer’s Run, Lola, Run
(1998), which I first saw in the Berlinale and has also become a staple of my
film esthetics classes. The conceit here
is to show a wildly dramatic event, in a few hours – from night to dawn –
through what seems one hand-held long take.
(A second viewing is of the essence, to track how it was done). What’s different from Gravity (2014) and Birdman
(2015) is the shifting tone of the film, and the clever playing with genre
conventions, moods and ultimately, plain old-fashioned suspense. ‘Riveting’ is an understatement to describe
the emotional twists and jolts of a strobe-lights beginning in a night club in
Berlin to a climatic ending, where the real time of the long take allows us to
physically ‘see’ how a final decision is made.
Victoria is the name of the non-German speaking young Spanish woman
(terrific performance by vivacious Laia Costa) who gets involved outside of the
disco with a bunch of hooligans – textbook case of beware of the big bad wolf –
and goes for it when things take an unexpected turn – the daring side of the
Spanish psyche. Part of the film’s
horrified delight is to see how the narrative machinery begins to slide into a
full crime film, after a romantic interlude of sorts, complete with an
unexpected twist two-thirds into the film.
The camera work by Sturla Bradth Grovlen will certainly fascinate more
than my cinematography students.
Sebastian Schipper is like a German Quentin Tarantino, with a sharp ear
for dialogue and a clever way of reworking cinematic conventions. Watch out for
the splash this Victoria of innocuous
title is bound to make
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