 |
| Taji Ahmadi and Zackaria Hashemi in Brick and Mirror |
Cast: Zackaria Hashemi, Taji Ahmadi, Jamshid Mashayekhi, Mehri Mehrnia, Forugh Farrokhzad, Parviz Fanizadeh, Munuchehr Farid, Akbar Meshkin, Mohamad Ali Keshavarz, Ebrahim Golestan (voice). Screenplay: Ebrahim Golestan. Cinematography: Amir Karari, Soleiman Minasian. Film editing: Ebrahim Golestan.
Taxicabs are irresistible tools for filmmakers, providing intimacy and mobility, both the close contact of driver and passenger and exploration of the variety of the city. The classic of the taxicab drama is, of course, Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), but it has also inspired filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch, whose Night on Earth (1991) consists of minidramas set in taxis in five different cities. In Ebrahim Golestan's Brick and Mirror the taxi both provokes the drama and allows for a satiric exploration of life in the city of Tehran as it was before the Islamic revolution. One night, cabbie Hashem (Zackaria Hashemi) picks up a fare, a woman in a black chador, and drives her to a remote site where construction has been abandoned. After she leaves, he hears a noise in the back seat: the cry of a baby. He searches for the woman but finds only a few derelicts at the site who claim not to know of any such woman. At this point, most of us would go straight to the police or the nearest hospital, but this is not a film in which people do the expected things. Instead, he takes the baby with him to a cafe: He's late turning over the keys to the cab to the next driver. He seeks advice from some friends there, but they respond only with ponderous philosophizing and caveats about going to the authorities. When he finally goes to the police, he is thrust into a Kafkaesque scene of bureaucratic indifference. He meets with his girlfriend, Taji (Taji Ahmadi), who helps him feed and change the infant, sleeps with him, and sees the opportunity to marry Hashem and start a family. Hashem is more worried about what the neighbors will think about her spending the night with him, and in the morning he takes the baby to an orphanage, which is unwilling to take in an undocumented foundling and sends him to the courthouse to provide the documentation he will need. As expected, he encounters still more bureaucracy. Brick and Mirror begins as film noir, shifts into urban parable, and ends poignantly and painfully. In short, it's an astonishing and exasperating work that should be more widely known and celebrated.
