At the “James Bond in Motion” exhibition at Covent Garden’s London Film Museum, fans and tourists have studied the Lotus Esprit submarine car (nicknamed “Wet Nellie”) from “The Spy Who Loved Me”, “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, 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, given a lengthy jail sentence (later commuted to house arrest) and banned for 20 years from making films. Since then, in great secrecy, he has made three more. The first, 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”, 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, his passengers — non-professional actors — argue about public executions, hawk bootleg DVDs, and make panicked wills on camera phones. The result is a grand panorama of city life, given shape by cruel oppression.
Two cars, and each one the soul of their movie. In “Spectre”, that pantherine grey Aston Martin is both the star of a lavishly destructive action sequence and a future merchandised income stream (a Corgi replica and Scalextric set will shortly be available). In “Taxi Tehran”, Panahi’s car (we never see its make) is the film’s sole location and, in a county where to take his camera on to the street would have invited instant arrest, its practical means of getting made.
His cab is not the kind you might hail in London or New York. Instead, it is a “savari” (shared taxi) that acts as an ad hoc four-seater bus, filled with various combinations of strangers needing rides to random points of the city. It is a natural setting for drama — there are arguments and confessions, and new passengers at regular intervals to help stir the pot.
Panahi’s status raises the stakes, of course, but for a long time in the films of Iran, the car — the taxi especially — has been a kind of obsession. In Abbas Kiarostami’s landmark “Ten”, a female cab driver’s 10 passengers make up a beautifully patchwork story; his earlier film, “Taste of Cherry”, found the suicidal Mr Badii driving around Tehran in search of someone to help bury him. If, under the clerics, public conversation is fraught with risk, and the private dulled by familiarity, the taxi is a zone between the two, a fleeting limbo where women can openly voice their opinions, the views of strangers co-mingle and a certain understanding exists: what is said in the car stays in the car.
This much is the stuff of real life. In a piece written earlier this year, the journalist Yara Elmjouie remarked on the way cab drivers hold forth at their passengers. “One will lambast the ‘damn mullahs’ under his breath. Another will praise former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a man of the people. I’ve heard both in a single day.”
In their book “Arab Youth”, published in 2012, authors Samir Khalaf and Roseanne Saad Khalaf looked at how young Iranians duck out from under the repression surrounding them. What they found was that “the car has become a somewhat portable private bubble that can be used in the public sphere. In their cars, young people can play illegal music, heterosocialise, and consume illegal substances. Though they are moving through the public sphere, the car gives them a sense of agency, a sense of control over their own bubble.” Later, they quote a 25-year-old taxi driver called Sahand from the south of Tehran, who put feelings for his cab simply: “I love my car because it’s my space.”
In the West, though, cars mean something else — so they mean something else in the movies, too. In Bond films, for instance, they are rousers of aspiration, gorgeous hardware that make you rue having to get the bus home afterwards. At the time of the first, 1962’s “Dr No”, car ownership was becoming common enough that, if a chunk of the audience squinted very hard, they could imagine themselves with an open-top Sunbeam Alpine. Fifty-three years later, “Spectre” finds the Aston Martin drooled over with more fetishistic zeal than any human co-star: driving it is the only task the script gives Daniel Craig that he doesn’t seem to see as a wearying chore.
Getting excited about precision engineering would also inspire a series of films that have quietly saved Hollywood’s bottom line. The seven “Fast & Furious” movies don’t have the burnished glitz of Bond, but their tales of illegal street racing on the fringes of the underworld have seen a low-budget vehicle for Vin Diesel bloom into that rarest of film industry treasures, the undentably reliable turner of vast profits (its success surviving even the death of longtime star Paul Walker).
Internationally, the films have accrued eyebrow-raising statistics: the most recent, “Fast & Furious 7”, is the highest-grossing movie ever released in China. As a rare successful western export, the “Furious” movies announce that life is a race, while Blu-Tacking the wishful self-images of the world’s boy racers up on screen just as the cars in Bond films tap into the dream lives of a million Alan Partridges.
But cars, on screen and in life, mean more to us than speed alone. In Tehran, the car is the place you can speak freely with a total stranger; in Western movies, it is where you go to be alone. What film of the recent past more adored the car than “Drive”, a bloody, neon-dazzled melodrama that opened with a wonderful display of parallel parking.
Yet the anonymous hero, played by Ryan Gosling, wasn’t simply in possession of a weirdly overdeveloped driving school skillset; he was also a variation on that old favourite, the lonesome cowboy; but instead of riding a horse, he was at the wheel of a Chevy Impala.
Doomed to brooding solitude, we could be as easily talking about Bond as “Drive”, two spins on the same archetype. (It’s not so surprising that “Drive”’s director Nicolas Winding Refn has hankered after making a Bond.) For both characters, their cars are very much not public spaces — even passenger seats seem pointless. In a parallel reality, there may be a sequel to “Drive” in which we find Gosling down on his luck and working for Uber, making small talk on shuttle runs to Los Angeles airport.
Could “Drive” have been set anywhere but LA, built to be navigated by cars, famously tooth-achey to live in without them? Look at that sprawl of unending boulevards being cruised through by single-occupancy vehicles and you remember after a while that these are also, of course, the streets of Hollywood. This, very literally, is how studio executives see the world.
In a Western movie, the whole premise of “Taxi Tehran” — the communally shared taxi — would strain plausibility. Panahi is an affable witness to the rich tapestry of human life; but think of American cinema and taxis, and the first, second and third films to come to mind will be 1976’s “Taxi Driver”, a brimming well of psychosis and alienation.
Only a mad person would drive a cab, and here was Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle to prove it. Only a mad person would be a passenger in a cab: enter Martin Scorsese himself, making an on-screen cameo to deliver a monologue so unutterably vile that even Travis looked appalled.
Almost 30 years later, things had scarcely improved in the other great American taxi movie, “Collateral”. This time, an average LA cabbie was abducted by a contract killer played by Tom Cruise. The message was clear: let a stranger into your car, even when it’s your job, and you deserve all the dianetics you get.
But then, in Hollywood cinema, the more public the transport, the more eternally disastrous the results. As free-market tub-thumping, it takes some beating. How else to explain the fact that when a studio finally made a film about that most quixotic of things, the Los Angeles bus, it was “Speed”, the 1994 action thriller with Dennis Hopper as a hijacker so fiendish he made sitting on the top deck of a suburban English trundler home unnerving afterwards.
It wasn’t a one-off. Glance back through a generation of American film, and horrified distrust of public transport hums off the screen. “Source Code”? Train crash. “Unbreakable”? Same again. “Runaway Train”? Indeed.
No one sane in a Hollywood movie ever boards a plane and expects to get off again, and subways and buses are, when not mechanically unsound, filled with people who look odd and may want to kill you.
Here again, Beverly Hills linked arms with Bond: think back to 2012’s “Skyfall” and we find in the film’s most gleeful set-piece a Jubilee line tube plunged off freshly bombed tracks and drooping into an inky abyss. Of course, no such big-budget horror features in “Taxi Tehran”.
In modern Iran, as you suspect Panahi would tell you, if he weren’t banned from giving interviews, nightmares are not spectacular. They’re real.
Driven to distraction: when the car’s the star
The Batmobile (various)
Never has a movie car been able to move with the times as fluidly as the Batmobile. In the austere 1940s, it was a four-year-old Cadillac. In the 1960s, it gained an impractical windscreen. Tim Burton made it retro-futurist, then Joel Schumacher turned it into a novelty. The last version we saw was Christopher Nolan’s functionally brutalist Tumbler.
Mini Cooper (“The Italian Job”)
Try to imagine “The Italian Job” without the Mini Cooper. How lumbering and tedious the chase scenes would have been if Michael Caine and his crew had chosen, say, a fleet of Ford Zephyrs for the robbery instead. The Mini was stylish, nimble, apparently indestructible and turned the film into an advertisement for classic British ingenuity.
Ecto-1 (“Ghostbusters”)
If you grew up with “Ghostbusters”, there’s a chance you just blindly accepted the iconography of Ecto-1. It’s not until you see it out of context that you realise how ugly it is. A combination of an ambulance and a hearse, its roof is loaded down with an entire Buckaroo’s worth of junk. Run-down, dangerous, but still charming — the perfect encapsulation of 1980s New York.
The Doof Wagon (“Mad Max: Fury Road”)
The Doof Wagon is less a car and more an articulated truck that exists purely to transport an enormous sound system through the desert, just so a blind guitarist who spends his entire life attached to some bungee ropes can ejaculate fire at his enemies.
Dodge Challenger R/T (“Vanishing Point”)
The 1960s had ended. Things were going south, and fast. It didn’t really matter why Barry Newman had to drive from Colorado to San Francisco as quickly as he could; he just did. Newman’s journey across America was a whistlestop tour of the decaying American dream, but it would have been for nothing had he not not done it in such a ferociously aggressive car. When he was in that Challenger, nothing could touch him. Except, you know, a bulldozer.
Ferrari 250 GT California Spider (“Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”)
In the 1980s, a car was a status symbol. And there was arguably no status symbol greater than Mr Frye’s Ferrari. A work of total beauty, it existed solely to be looked at. To touch this car would be a disaster for everyone, as the characters would find out in time. This car represented the beating heart of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” — life is too short to rot away pristinely. Grab it by the throat, and then go and stand around pretentiously at an art gallery for a bit.
Bumblebee (“Transformers”)
If you were an alien race of gigantic robots, chances are you would want to disguise yourself as something subtle. Not Bumblebee, though. He chose to hide inside a bright yellow Camaro, which is an obnoxious berk of a car. It’s the sort of car you find yourself involuntarily snorting at, because the driver is almost definitely an overcompensatory ninny in the agonising death throes of the world’s biggest midlife crisis. It’s a car without taste. It’s a car for absolute wazzocks. “Transformers” was directed by Michael Bay.
The Mirth Mobile (“Wayne’s World”)
Easily the most upsetting car on this list. Garth’s car — a 1976 AMC Pacer — looks as if it’s been salvaged from a tip. It’s sunken and forlorn. Its headlights look depressed. It doesn’t even really have a colour. And yet, like Garth himself, it desperately wants to be better than it is. Look at that flame job on the side. It’s too small to be ostentatious - or anything other than heartbreakingly pathetic — but it’s there. In its own quiet way, it demands attention.
–Stuart Heritage/Guardian News & Media Ltd
