Jafar Panahi’s Taxi is a winning, happy, unhappy, humane little road movie.

Jafar Panahi’s Taxi directed by Jafar Panahi. At the Kendall Square Cinema, Cambridge, MA.

A scene from “Jafar Panahi’s Taxi.”

By Gerald Peary

Despite being under house arrest in Iran since 2010 and forbidden by the government to make cinema, the great filmmaker Jafar Panahi refuses to put down his camera. This is Not a Movie (2011) was a movie, and so was Closed Curtain (2013), no-budget personal documentaries which he shot in the claustrophobic confines of his living quarters, then snuck out of the country to be exhibited around the world.

In 2015, has the Iranian government lightened up on the world-renowned director of such masterpieces as The White Balloon (1995) and The Circle (2000)? Or are they just looking the other way? Whatever the explanation, Jafar Panahi’s Taxi is filmed in broad daylight on the streets of Tehran. At least for one afternoon, Panahi has sprung free. On a lark, he’s behind the wheel of a yellow cab, picking up passengers. That’s the whole story of this winning, happy, unhappy, humane little road movie. Panahi drives about Iran’s capitol, and random citizens enter and exit his cab, engage him in conversation, tell their stories. Their colorful gab is captured on several video cameras placed strategically within the taxi, including on the dashboard, and which remain operative throughout. The final film is an editing of the most arresting moments of what occurred in the taxi, with shots easily matched the way of multiple cameras on a TV sitcom.

Is Jafar Panahi’s Taxi a fiction film or a documentary? There is no help at the end of the film because there are no credits. We aren’t told if there is a script, or if the people in the movie are “real” or are actors. So here’s my guess. Nothing is arbitrary or unplanned. Panahi has mapped out and orchestrated who rides in the cab, where they sit, and in what order they get picked up and left at a destination. The dialogue is lightly scripted, occasionally improvised, but Panahi has explained to each cab passenger what he or she should talk about, what they should do. Perhaps there were informal rehearsals of some of the scenes. Perhaps some scenes were shot more than once. And as often the case in Iranian cinema, the cast are probably non-actors playing versions of themselves. Most important, although the cameras are supposedly clandestine, all who appear on camera have signed on, aware they are being filmed. And cognizant they could get in deep trouble appearing in a work made by that culture outlaw Jafar Panahi.

The sequences go from lightly absurd and funny to troubling and political, from Panahi’s enjoyment of the rich fabric of secular life in Tehran to his anxiety of residing in a society controlled by the thought-police of Iran’s religious oligarchy.

The apolitical humor comes from a slight scene in which two middle-aged women transport goldfish in the taxi to be tossed into a pond, and a better scene where we meet the engaging Mr. Omid, who—how American!—used to run a now-shutdown video store. These days, he makes do by selling pirated DVDs of the latest Hollywood blockbusters and hot TV programs. He does business from the back seat of Panahi’s cab, trying to peddle The Walking Dead, Season 5 to a university film student. “I can bring you dailies of movies in the making,” Mr. Omid brags, and reminds Panahi what the filmmaker had rented at his store: a demanding Turkish arthouse film and also Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris.

More humor? Black humor? The cab is stopped and a bleeding man is dumped into the back seat, accompanied by his hysteric wife. (Is he really injured or is that stage blood? I think the latter.) He desperately prays, “There is no other God but Allah!” and thinks he will die. He doesn’t. He gets to the hospital and survives. My confession: I don’t get the point of this scene.

More politically clear is when Panahi picks up from school his precocious, sharp-tongued tween niece, Hana, and she’s a filmmaker, too. She’s carrying around a little camera to enter a competition for a Public Education Festival. Shrewd and ambitious, Ali wants to make a “distributable film.” So she’s adhering to the rules laid out by her obviously conservative teacher. Respect the Islamic head scarf in your student movie, use the names of Islamic saints, and “avoid political and economic issues.” And have positive heroes—like Soviet and Maoist cinema and Hollywood—who exhibit “unselfishness and sacrifice.”

Everything that Panahi abhors, and has battled against in his cinema.

Except for the odd incident with the bleeding man, there’s no violence on screen in Jafar Panahi’s Taxi. Nor was there in ancient Greek drama. In both cases, the dreadful, horrible things are reported. We hear of an incident in which a family of fathers and brothers brutalized an Afghan man who was a suitor in their Tehran neighborhood. A sad, depressed childhood friend of Panahi shows him a video of the man being beaten up by a man and his wife, who also stole his money. This compassionate man knows that the husband and wife had a terrible life. He has decided not to report them to the police because of the unspeakable things the authorities would do to this unfortunate couple.

The most overtly political scene is when Panahi brings into his taxi a flower lady carrying roses. She turns out to be a valiant lawyer who was disbarred for supporting human rights and defending prisoners of the regime. Even now, she visits these prisoners, brings them flowers. She herself has been jailed but she says (the film’s most pessimistic moment), “The world is a bigger cell.” The oligarchs are always about. “They make your friends your enemies.”

Still, there is hope, from this woman and from Panahi. She leaves a flower as a gift for “the people of the cinema.” Panahi comes in close, fills the screen for us, with this gorgeous red, red rose.

Gerald Peary is a professor at Suffolk University, Boston, curator of the Boston University Cinematheque, and the general editor of the “Conversations with Filmmakers” series from the University Press of Mississippi. A critic for the late Boston Phoenix, he is the author of nine books on cinema, writer-director of the documentaries For the Love of Movies: the Story of American Film Criticism and Archie’s Betty, and a featured actor in the 2013 independent narrative Computer Chess.