Metal and Melancholy

In this marvelous film, everything is human—far too human—starting with the rickety cars that always seem older than their drivers. A “Taxi” sign on the windshield can save a life. Everyone struggling to make ends meet knows it—whether police officers, engineers, or single mothers. The doors, the engines, nothing that makes a car a car seems likely to survive, yet ingenuity and humor sustain these magical beings of old metal, necessary companions to a precarity that has descended on the city like one of the ten plagues of Egypt. Inside each taxi, a life—sealed in its bubble—carves out an ever more uncertain path through the traffic. Here lies our passage on Earth, mirrored. Love, poetry, faith, and death all find their voice in these little boxes, with sumptuous elegance.

Claire Simon
Filmmaker