SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot.
This furiously fast and funny action flic flick kick-started one of the most successful franchises in French film history. A non-driving cop coerces a speed-obsessed, law-breaking taxi driver into helping him pursue a gang of Mercedes-driving bank robbers who bring mayhem to the streets of Marseille. C’est magnifique!
Dick Fiddy, bfi.org.uk
A contemporary review
Last summer’s surprise hit in France, Gérard Pirès’ cops-and-robbers car-chase comedy Taxi arrives belatedly in the UK with a certain reputation in tow: it drew a domestic audience of over 6 million, had high-octane panache rivalling the best of Hollywood and Luc Besson’s name stamped all over it. Besson produced and wrote the film, reportedly turning out the script during pre-production discussions for The Fifth Element. Pirès, best remembered for his comedies Erotissimo (1968) and Elle court, elle court la banlieue (1972), graduated to feature film-making from shorts and television in the wake of May ’68, and directed eight films before a serious motorcycle accident forced him into temporary retirement. He subsequently re-emerged as one of France’s most successful directors of advertisements, notably of visually arresting car adverts.
On the evidence here, writing the script entailed for Besson subjecting his favourite US television series to a cut-and-paste process (Starsky and Hutch gets a nod, but the tone is more The Dukes of Hazzard), resulting in a compendium of familiar gizmos, plot twists and characters that unashamedly panders to aspiring boy racers everywhere. But the film is also played out through references to French comic-book and popular cop film traditions. Henri Verneuil’s Jean-Paul Belmondo vehicles are obvious precursors (the Athens-based car chase in his 1972 Le Casse comes to mind), and Claude Zidi’s incomparably superior Les Ripoux/Le Cop is referenced (or, less generously, recycled). Marseilles is shot to look like San Francisco circa Bullitt (1968), local colour reduced to the glimpses caught beyond the rapidly disappearing asphalt. A single picture-postcard view of the city is inserted presumably as a ‘thank you’ to the municipal authorities.
Where Godard threw similar ingredients together in 1966 and came up with the startlingly inventive Made in U.S.A., Besson and Pirès’ leaden hotchpotch has the flavour of déjà vu. Where Made in U.S.A. is fuelled by a biting critique of French society and a prescient reflection on the US colonisation of the European mindset, Besson and Pirès merely tack youth friendly clichés (institutionalised racism, police ineptitude and so on) on to the film’s exterior. Granted, Pirès has done a good job on the stunts and car chases, some of them superbly choreographed at genuinely high speeds. For a film that draws freely on the French erotic comic-book tradition, the racial stereotyping and sexism come as no surprise. Besides being systematically introduced via shots of their legs, none of the female characters is more than a caricature. France’s bypassing of the UK’s detour through ‘new man’ sensibility, however, means that in this country the film can now plug neatly into a male youth market weaned on a brutish ‘new laddism’.
Rap group IAM make a fair stab at encouraging the action along through the often laborious non-action scenes, then upping the tempo (and volume) appropriately for the sporadic big-bang crescendoes. The generally young cast provide a welcome injection of good-natured buffoonery into a stale film whose principal significance lies less in any intrinsic artistic quality than in the French public’s acceptance of a young non-white French actor, Samy Naceri, in the lead role of a major box-office hit. But despite the film’s success, which guaranteed an almost instant sequel (Taxi 2 is currently in production), nothing dispels the lingering sense that this is a lacklustre hybrid. Besson and Pirès have ended up underscoring the paucity of a cinema that contents itself with the formulaic regurgitation of the forms and aspirations of Hollywood and its televisual derivatives or of a European cinema that is – in every sense other than geographically – made in the USA.
Michael Witt, Sight and Sound, December 1999
TAXI
Director: Gérard Pirès
Producer: Michèle Pétin
Producers (ARP): Laurent Pétin, Michèle Halberstadt
Producer: Luc Besson *
Screenplay: Luc Besson
Director of Photography: Jean-Pierre Sauvaire
Editor: Véronique Lange
Art Director: Jean-Jacques Gernolle
Music: IAM
Cast
Samy Naceri (Daniel Morales)
Frédéric Diefenthal (Émilien Coutan Kermadec)
Marion Cotillard (Lilly, Daniel’s girlfriend)
Emma Sjöberg (Petra, a cop)
Manuela Gourary (Camille, a cop)
Bernard Farcy (Chief Inspector Gibert)
Georges Neri (Joe)
Guy Quang (Pizza Joe motorcyclist)
Maurice Murcia (retired taxi-driver)
Sabine Bail (receptionist, town hall)
Dan Herzberg (Paulo)
Sébastien Thiery (driving instructor)
Eric Berenger (the butcher)
Philippe Du Janerand (airport fare in a hurry)
Christophe Fesquet (speed cop 1)
Gérard Vantaggioli (speed cop 2)
Edouard Montoute (Alain)
Tara Römer (Émilien’s colleague)
Christian Mazzuchini (pilot 1)
Guillaume Lanson (pilot 2)
Sébastien Pons (Akim, called ‘Rachid’)
Malek Béchar (Marco)
Gérard Dubouche (Gibert’s chauffeur)
Richard Sammel (German 1)
Niels Dubost (German 2)
Franck Libert (German 3)
Dominique Noé (minister)
Pierre Brichese (minister’s chauffeur)
Stéphan Chriz (German 4)
Paul Fructus (bar owner)
Grégory Knop (Kruger)
Denis Braccini (fireman)
Bernard Destouches (roadblock cop)
Emilio Martinez (cleaner, 2nd bank)
Catherine Alias (cleaner)
Stéphane Algoud (Jimmy, key cutter)
Thierry Melia (bank cashier)
Jérôme Leleu (Jean Bat)
Jean-François Palaccio (younger dumb cop)
Henri Masini (older dumb cop)
Jean-Baptiste Chaudoul (cop at traffic light 13)
Paul Silve (the commissioner)
Didier Gayral (man with the box)
Stéphane Eichenholc (speed cop 3)
France 1998
86 mins
Digital
* Uncredited
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
Notes may be edited or abridged
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