In the opening scene of Ciro De Caro’s Taxi Monamour, the film introduces one of its two heroines in a hospital clinic: a young Italian waitress Anna (Rosa Palasciano) who, as the film hints, suffers from some chronic illness. The film’s other primary is Cristi (Yeva Sai), a Ukrainian refugee who has fled the ongoing war and hopes to find a steady job and a new beginning away from her homeland. It’s late one evening, as they futilely wait for the night bus to arrive and a pair of immigrant guys offer to give them a lift by their car (also the scene that inspires the film’s title), that these two women’s paths cross and they begin to form a very intimate yet short-term friendship. It’s clear that the pair have apparent differences and less visible similarities, but the essential contrast between Anna and Cristi can be easily found in their divergent attitudes toward life: Anna, notwithstanding the burden of her health condition, embodies a lively and positive spirit, while Cristi appears to be a more melancholic and reserved soul. Indeed, it’s easy from this point to anticipate the film’s shape: a shared inter- and intrapersonal journey will commence, with Anna gradually coaxing her newfound friend toward self-actualization, existential liberation, and an altogether more life-affirming worldview.
However, despite the film’s governing concept and the on-screen chemistry shared between Palasciano and Sai, Taxi Monamour unfortunately mostly lands as a forgettable effort that fails on various levels. The film never distinguishes itself aesthetically, with De Caro’s style landing something like a modern-day kitchen sink realism all Italiana, never registering as more than an imitation of Cristian Mungiu or the Dardennes. De Caro feels far more concerned with his film’s structure than its style, gradually distributing bits of sparse narrative information across the runtime — information that, from around the film’s midpoint, starts to become repetitive and dramatically unrewarding. What visual character there is mostly formed by the use of a handheld camera, excessive close-ups, and a tilt toward minimalism (faint colors, low and natural lighting) that, while clearly intending to create an intimate space for the relationship of the two, leads to develop, instead becomes exhaustingly anonymous and flat. The camera frequently follows Anna and Cristi from behind in nighttime scenes, watching as they walk along a street, or captures them from the backseat of a car that is driving into the shot’s depth of field. De Caro also even deploys a stereotypically nostalgic pop song (here, O-Zone’s “Dragostea Din Tei”) about an hour in, injecting a dose of artificial sentimentality before abruptly cutting to radio silence punctuated by the sound of Cristi vomiting in the street.
These cliché and manipulative maneuvers are present throughout Taxi Monamour, and at the expense of developing any real substance: the relationship between Anna and Cristi, as well as the involvement of other characters, remains underdeveloped or poorly conceived to a point where initial curiosity quickly fades and it becomes hard to actually invest in what’s happening from moment to moment. Instead, viewers are left to suspend any active engagement with both story and characters until some final destination we know is coming, one where it’s easy to predict that some striking moment will put a punctuation mark on the two friends’ inevitable separation. Here, that culmination takes the form of a beautifully sun-drenched scene at the beach, the sea providing the requisite, worn-out allegorical suggestion of spiritual freedom, where Anna and Cristi participate in group meditation and then joyfully, childlike, rush into the water. If only that measure of invigoration had animated the rest of the film.
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