Metal and Melancholy

In this marvelous film, everything is human, all too human—starting with the rickety cars that always turn out to be older than their drivers. A “Taxi” sign on the windshield is what saves lives. Everyone knows it—those who can’t make ends meet: police officers or engineers, single mothers, and so on. The doors, the engines—nothing that makes up a car seems able to last, yet ingenuity and humor keep these magical beings of old metal alive, as indispensable companions to the precarity that has descended upon the city like one of the ten plagues of Egypt. Inside each taxi, a life, in its own bubble, makes its way ever more uncertainly through the traffic… Here is our passage on Earth laid bare. Love, poetry, faith, and death find expression in these little boxes with sumptuous elegance.
 

Claire Simon
Filmmaker