Directions could be described as Central Europe’s
companion piece to the celebrated Argentine 2014 black comedy and film anthology
Wild Tales. Both are portmanteau films that deal with contemporary economic
and social concerns of the middle class in their respective global geographies.
Both films make you laugh at times, only to present a more somber appraisal of
reality.
There is a virtual bond between Stephen Komandarev and Argentine director Damian Szifron, even though they might not have met each other or even seen each other’s works. While Szifron’s film gave us six stand-alone original tales written by the film director himself, Komandarev’s film is about six taxi drivers’ diverse actions as they drive their taxis in Bulgaria’s capital Sofia, also original tales co-scripted by the Bulgarian director with Simeon Ventsislavov. Szifron’s Argentine film, in the director own words, was about “law abiding citizens who face difficulty in making money and do so many things we are not interested in…a lot of people get depressed and some explode and this is a film about those who explode.” Komandarev’s film, too, is about some people who “explode” and some others who choose alternate solutions, when faced with economic and social difficulties in leading an honest life, by helping those who need help, whether it is humans or animals, and even undertaking a second unrelated occupation to make ends meet.
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| Trying to resolve financial problems in ways he knows best |
US film director Jim Jarmusch had made a somewhat parallel
film in 1991 presenting five taxi drivers in five cities in a film called Night
on Earth. Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi used the same template in his 2015
film Taxi with a single taxi driver (Panahi himself) interacting with
various customers in Teheran.
Directions is a film that presents the sad reality of
Bulgaria’s post-Communist, post-Glasnost society, where the pessimists have
fled the country for greener pastures and the optimists have stayed on, despite
growing corruption, rising costs of living and persistent Communist mentality of the past. People work hard to earn honest wages–yet
they suffer heart attacks and end up leading lonely lives. Prostitution is
rampant as young girls want to live on the fast lane despite elders advising
them to change.
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| A schoolgirl takes a ride |
All the taxi drivers in Directions drive their taxis
due to their economic and social compulsions.
One of the taxi drivers is a middle-aged woman whose economic plight
might have hinged on an event during her university days when she refused the
sexual advances of a man who a decade later is wealthy and based in Austria but
fails to recognize her in the present avatar of the taxi driver. Another is an
Orthodox priest driving a taxi in the night to augment his income, an unusual
scenario elsewhere in the world. One might laugh at certain situations the
film’s script offers but overall the film is pessimistic with a dash of
religion thrown in. Even the dead drive taxis in this film, in the epilogue.
From start to finish, the underlying commentary is on
earning money to survive in modern Bulgaria. A taxi driver uses his wiles to
stop a man who has called his taxi for a ride before attempting to jump off a bridge, ostensibly to get his precious
fare that would be lost if the man does jump off. But the segment reveals other unusual contemporary
social problems—the man is a philosophy teacher living alone whose students
have made fun of him on Facebook that leads him to think of ending his life. What follows are uplifting and witty
interactions between him and the taxi driver. The film Directions proves
that the Bulgarian taxi drivers have a heart of gold and are not merely focused
on making money.
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| Loneliness, poverty, Facebook and a taxi driver make an interesting cocktail in this suicide attempt |
Unlike most European films, Bulgarian cinema gives a lot of
importance to family ties. A father lives for his daughter’s future. One
episode of the film is on a father bemoaning the loss of his son, a loss he
cannot tide over. He projects his love for his dead son by feeding a stray dog
each night.
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| ...and taxi drivers who take revenge for what led them to a life of a taxi driver |
There are suicidal characters. There are characters who commit
adultery. There are others who take revenge on those who have made their life
miserable in the distant past (as in the opening segment of Wild Tales).
Opposing the negativism are the generous
individuals who drive taxis in Sofia not merely for money but extending a helping
hand when required to those in trouble—young school girls, old and sick
bachelors who need medical and financial help, and suicidal teachers with
little or no family to fall back on during stress.
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| Taxi drivers who help the sick and lonely to reach their destinations |
Komandarev’s film strings the beads of the stand-alone
episodes in a commendable manner to give us a lovely Bulgarian necklace, unlike
its Argentine counterpart. The first episode ends with a taxi driver that is
brain dead. Many of the later episodes have other taxi drivers listening to the
news of that unfortunate incident. Another middle episode has a taxi driver
taking a famous heart surgeon rushing to undertake a last operation in Bulgaria
before he emigrates to greener pastures. Later in the film, you have a unemployed
and lonely baker having to call a taxi to take him to hospital where he has
been told they have a heart available for transplant that would suit him. The
viewer has to string the not-so-obvious beads of the necklace.
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| Taxi drivers who care about stray animals as much as their own family |
Where does religion fit into all this? At the obvious level,
there is an Orthodox priest moonlighting as a taxi driver with a cross dangling
on his chest. The epilogue of the dead
taxi driver continuing his trade and caring for his daughter after death is
another. The interesting philosophical conversation between the priest-turned-taxi-driver
and his passenger on the way to get a new heart at the hospital is a highlight
of the film.
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| An Orthodox priest moonlights as a taxi driver |
More than religion, it is the sad state of Bulgarian family
life that is laid bare. Husbands cheat on wives. Many men lead lonely lives of
bachelorhood. School girls grow up in the absence of their biological mothers
and some take to prostitution. And yet unlike other parts of Europe, Directions
seem to be a soulful cry from those who have stayed put in Bulgaria wistfully
harking back to their social and religious traditions of old, amidst the ruins.
P.S. Directions is one of the author’s top 10 films of 2017. It won the best screenplay award at the Gijon
International Film Festival and was picked to participate in the Un Certain Regard section
of the Cannes Film Festival. Two films mentioned in the above review, the
Argentine film Wild Tales (2014) and the Iranian film Taxi
(2015) have been reviewed earlier on this blog. (Click on the name of
the film in this post-script for a quick access to those reviews on this blog.)
