Dir. Gabriela David, 2001, Argentina, 93 mins
Cast:
Diego Peretti, Josefina Viton, Miguel Guerberof, Pochi Ducasse
Like the recent Michael Mann film Collateral, much of the drama in Taxi, an encounter centres on a cab driver working at night who picks up a mysterious passenger. However, whereas Collateral felt like a retread of Mann's film Heat, the situation in Taxi, an encounter feels fresh and spontaneous. Although Collateral began with an intriguing situation and featured a couple of gripping action sequences, it often stuck rigidly to its generic thriller template and held only one or two surprises. Taxi, an encounter looks as if it will follow a predictable path, but what starts out as a thriller slowly changes into a romantic tale of redemption.
When we first meet the cab driver named Esteban (Diego Peretti), he's like Jean Paul Belmondo's character from Godard's classic film À Bout De Souffle; an irresponsible petty criminal and car thief who sells the taxis that he steals to the 'Three Brothers', a trio of criminals who run an auto-repair yard. However, Esteban also drives around Buenos Aires in his taxi and pretends to be a taxi driver. Not only does this earn him some extra money, but it also gives him the opportunity talk to the passengers he picks up. At the end of an evening's work, Esteban picks up one last passenger, a young teenage girl (Josefina Viton) who passes out in the back of his cab, due to a bullet wound in her shoulder. Esteban takes her back to his flat, removes the bullet, drops her off on a street corner and then calls an ambulance, which takes her to hospital, where she recovers from her injury.
This incident, which takes place during one night, is told predominantly from Esteban's point of view and makes up the first half of the film. In the second half, the story is told from the young girl's perspective as she tries to recover from the trauma she suffered on the night she was picked up by Esteban. Leaving hospital and living with her grandmother (Pochi Ducasse) outside the city, the girl has vague memories of Esteban's flat; specifically, she can remember a view through the window in the flat that framed a motorway (an image that recurs throughout the film). She also caught a glimpse of Esteban visiting the hospital just as she left with her grandmother, and she soon decides to track down her unlikely saviour and discover more about him.
Esteban may look and act like a cool, nonchalant movie hero, but he's all too human. He's Belmondo's À Bout De Souffle anti-hero, but with a deep sense of responsibility. He likes to play at being a cab driver so that he can talk to people, and when he makes passing references to his father, we assume that he has no family in his life. Therefore it's a surprise when we discover that he does have a father, who he obviously cares for and wants to help. The father (Miguel Guerberof) tells Esteban that he's acting like he's in a movie when he attempts to remove the bullet from the girl's arm, and that's probably an accurate description of Esteban's life. By taking on a cool criminal persona and working for a bunch of hoodlums, we expect standard movie thriller conventions to play a major role as the story unfolds, and to an extent, they do. The first half has a cool, calm Esteban telling us about his criminal life in voiceover, and there's even a Tarantino-esque bit of comic violence involving the Three Brothers, who have a score to settle with Esteban.
But after the dramatic events of the film's first half, the slower pacing and change of direction of the narrative in the second half signal that real life doubts and anxieties have halted Esteban's movie-like life of crime, and that the incident with the girl has somehow made him quit his criminal lifestyle. The repeated view from the window of Esteban's flat makes the outside world look like images on a cinema screen, and it's an image that lodges in the audience's mind as they watch the film. It's also an image that lingers in the girl's mind and which enables her to track down Esteban. The girl in this story looks and acts like Natalie Portman in Leon, with her character even sharing a similar back story with Portman's. However, unlike the overt love story presented in Leon, the romantic feelings that this girl has for Esteban are only hinted at. The main focus is on the experience that brought them together and the changes that have taken place in their lives since then. Not only are they both lucky to be alive, but they also recognise that the incident was an important turning point in both of their lives.
Diego Peretti and Josefina Viton are excellent in their roles and they both come across as real people who got caught up in an unlikely situation. The relationship between them is affecting without being over sentimental, and this is reinforced by Mariano Nuñez West's gentle music score. The film also contains a number of shots and sequences that stick firmly in the memory. Along with the view of a motorway that is seen through Esteban's window, the opening shot is also beautifully framed and lit by cinematographer Miguel Abal. We watch as a view of a street corner turns from day to night, familiarising us with one of the principal locations of the film before drawing us into an incident that becomes a focal point of the story. Director Gabriela David doesn't tie herself up in knots with plot twists or conjure up contrivances to get the two protagonists to meet up quickly. Instead, she lets the relationship between the two characters develop slowly and naturally, which heightens our expectations about what will happen in the film's second half. Ultimately, Taxi, an Encounter is a refreshing twist on thriller conventions, and a moving and memorable film.
Martyn Bamber
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