A balloon shaped like a heart flies from the open window of a taxi. It is late at night and the woman (Leila Hatami) who this gift was bestowed upon simply couldn’t care less about the useless trinket, far more interested in comparing the quality of the accompanying chocolate boxes dispensed by a handful of men who wish to have her as a Valentine. Ditching sentimentality altogether, she rationally assesses her predicament — as a young, attractive single woman, she is guaranteed to find a match who can provide her with the comfortable life she deserves. Matchmaking here is, as Florence Pugh as Amy March worded wisely in Greta Gerwig’s 2019 “Little Women,” merely a business transaction.
READ MORE: Cannes Film Festival 2022 Preview: 25 Must-See Films To Watch
The taxi driver (Mehrdad Sedighian) is not quite as jaded. An insecure romantic, he gasps at the passenger’s candor, posing question after question as the woman breaks down the logistics behind her juggling of prospects. Curious, the driver timidly asks if he would have a shot. “Don’t even think about it. For less than a BMW, I don’t even pick up,” she promptly replies, ruthless in her words but not in her delivery. To her, sugarcoating would be far worse an offense than the truth.
The witty seesawing between driver and passenger is the biggest triumph of Ali Behrad’s “Tasavor (Imagine),” selected for the Critics’ Week sidebar of this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Played almost entirely inside a taxi, the film explores the platonic relationship between the two as they come back to one another time and time again despite the agony of knowing their time together can only be had inside the intimate, confined space of the car. Not much is said about the people they were before fate brought them together on the night the cabbie took the woman to the top of the hill where she would lay the ashes of her murdered brother, a tragedy made lighter by her unwillingness to surrender to grimness, “He was overweight, it makes for a lot of ash,” she jokingly remarks while petting away dust from her bright yellow poncho.
Their days are, as with their past, unmentioned. The film takes place entirely at night, drawing inspiration from Wong Kar Wai and Richard Linklater to weave a tale of doomed lovers suspended in the timeless limbo between dusk and dawn. Under the comfortable blanket of darkness lies a safe space for words often left unsaid, suggestions turned brief possibilities turned heartbreak. The script cleverly intertwines moments of giggle-inducing comedy and heart-rending vulnerability and, in this balance, Leila Hatami — from “A Separation” fame — particularly excels.
The actress roams the tricky territory between jest and melodrama with effortless charm, groaning suggestively while tugging at a piece of fabric turned windshield wiper, and dismissively waving at the driver’s unjustified bouts of meekness. Tears sprawl from her smudged eyes as make-up runs from skin onto fabric, her hands grasping for the familiarity of the passengers’ seat as a world she believed to have mastered rapidly crumbles around her. In generous silence, Sedighian finds the measured response to Hatami’s attention-stealing performance, his eyes framed through the rearview mirror as he drinks the woman in, longing for the unreachable without ever crossing the threshold into bitterness.
For all in which it excels, ‘Tasavor’ still plays very much as a feature debut, its oftentimes stretched sequences occasionally muddling the inspired moments of butterflies-in-your-stomach romanticism. Behrad lingers on moments void of meaning for the sake of accumulating minutes, leading one to wonder if this story would have been more suited to the leaner length of a short film. Alas, forgiveness feels like an easy ask when pondering on the film’s earnestness, a direct reflection of the director’s tangible love for serendipitous yet hopeless encounters. [B-]
Follow along with all our coverage from the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.