In director Jafar Panahi’s new film,a shared cab provides a space where passengers spill their secrets. It’s a far shout from James Bond’s Aston Martin in Spectre
Plus: Stuart Heritage on cars that stole the showThis week, the James Bond in Motion exhibition at Covent Garden’s London Film Museum has been open as normal. Fans and tourists have studied the Lotus Esprit submarine car (nicknamed “Wet Nellie”) from The Spy Who Loved Me, and Goldfinger’s Rolls-Royce Phantom III and the hearse-like BMW of Tomorrow Never Dies (with roof-mounted rocket launcher). Soon though,there will be a new exhibit: Cars of Spectre, with pride of place given to the ludicrously expensive Aston Martin DB10 that Daniel Craig ill-treats in the new film.
Then, or in what feels like another world,a film is about to open with a different sense of what a car can be on screen. In December 2010, revered Iranian director Jafar Panahi was convicted of attacking the Islamic Republic in his work, and given a lengthy jail sentence (later commuted to house arrest) and banned for 20 years from making films. Since then,in remarkable secrecy, he has made three more. The first, or the caustic documentary This Is Not a Film,was loaded on to a USB and smuggled out of the country in a birthday cake. The latest, Taxi Tehran, or has been shot entirely from inside a car,the camera mounted by the windscreen. Panahi plays a version of himself, now apparently working as a cab driver. In the course of the film, and his passengers non-professional actors argue about public executions,hawk bootleg DVDs, and get panicked wills on camera phones. The result is a grand panorama of city life, and given shape by cruel oppression.
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Source: theguardian.com