'He hates New York with a Biblical fury; it gives off the stench of Hell, and its filth and smut obsess him."
So wrote Pauline Kael in her legendary New Yorker review of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, a seminal New York film that came out in 1976, with Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle, an ex-Marine who "can't find any entry point into human society" and finally unleashes his bottled-up rage against the city -- or against what he believes to be the smut and filth of the city -- in a perfervid spree of violence.
Taxi Driver was released in Bangkok, at the now-no-more Siam Theatre, in November 1976, nine months after its February release in the US and six months after it won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, confirming Scorsese as one of the most exciting filmmakers of his generation. Siam Theatre ran an ad for the film in the Bangkok Post, with the tag line "In every street in every city of this country there's a nobody who dreams of being somebody". The Thai title of the film is Taxi Khlang -- Mad Taxi.
This Sunday at noon, Taxi Driver will hit the screen of Scala Theatre as part of the World Class Cinema series hosted by the Thai Film Archive. This is the fourth film from the "New Hollywood" period to be shown in the monthly series, following Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Parts I and II and Apocalypse Now.
(Meanwhile, the series has treated audiences to more populist titles such as Ben-Hur, The Sound Of Music, Psycho and Singin' In The Rain.)
A disturbing and decade-defining movie, Taxi Driver's feverish vibe has a deeper implications than the madness exhibited in Travis's much-parodied "You talkin' to me?" monologue. (Its YouTube clip has probably been seen by more people than the actual movie has, and its memes are equally proliferous, 42 years later).
As Kael suggested in her review, Travis Bickle is a sick soul who wants to save New York, or mankind, or at least the 12-year-old child prostitute played by Jodie Foster. Lost in Manhattan's neon glow and filth, in the post-Vietnam hypocrisy and American faux-dream, Travis the taxi driver longs for purity -- there's something radically spiritual, or spiritually radical, in his uncontained anger. And yet he's too ill, too broken, to save even himself, let alone anyone else.
The script is by Paul Schrader, himself a great thinker on cinema and a director of several fine films, including the just-released priest drama First Reformed. Scorsese, who directed this after Mean Streets and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, gave the story a raw, pulpy brutalism that had come to define New York in the 1970s, and he staged some memorable mise-en-scène that is still discussed in film schools today -- such as when the camera pans from Travis into the empty corridor while he's speaking on the phone, or the spectacle of the blood-splattered walls at the end. The film was supposed to get an X rating due to its violence, before Scorsese agreed to tone it down to receive an R.
Cybill Shepherd also stars in the film, playing the very blond, very white Betsy, a political campaign worker whom Travis takes out on a date. That's another brutal scene, and without a single drop of blood: Travis, unable to grasp the reality of the world, takes Betsy to a cinema -- to watch a pornographic movie, thinking it will impress her. Also of note: Bernard Herrmann composed the score and died two months before the film came out in the US.
The story of a taxi driver as a street-level, low-earning worker, an eyewitness to all that's wrong with society, day and night, himself stuck at the lowest rung of social injustice, is so powerful and continues to feel relevant. It also became a model for many other films about taxi-driving tragic-heroes. In 1977, a Thai film called Thongpoon Khokpo, Ratsadorn Tem Khan (Citizen Thongpoon) stars Jatupon Pooapirom as a father from Isan who's come to drive a taxi in Bangkok; soon his car is stolen and he has to endure a string of unjust treatment. Last year, a Korean film called A Taxi Driver tells the real-life story of a taxi driver who gets caught in the Gwangju uprising.
So see you at the Scala this Sunday. A date with Travis Bickle will not be a rose-tinted one (ask Betsy) but to watch Taxi Driver on the big screen is to watch one of the finest cinematic endeavours that captures a city and the souls of its inhabitants at their most hellish -- and most real.
Taxi Driver will screen at Scala at noon on Sunday. Tickets are available now at the cinema.
