Taxi para tres

Taxi para tres was greeted in Santiago de Chile with cheering and millions of people went to see the film. At the festival of San Sebastian, the film won the highest award, allegedly thanks to jury chairman Claude Chabrol. The press hated his choice. Too vulgar a film, they said. But what is vulgarity? Is the society in which we live not the peak of filth? Taxi para tres is a sharp comedy about exactly this reality.Starvation makes the poorest people rebel as soon as they come into contact with the wealth of advertising, that dominant system that turns people into completely brainless consumers. The film seems to begin as if it was a bad detective novel. A taxi breaks down in a slum district and is captured by two bandits, who force the driver to join in their dirty deeds. The spectator finds himself in a story where good and evil seem to be firmly rooted in their roles. But it isn’t long before the victim becomes executioner, an executioner who turns crooks into angels. In a way that has rarely been seen since the great Italian comedies of the Fifties and Sixties, Lübbert paints a portrait of a couple of losers in the face of what is known as globalisation (the word is fashionable) or the consumer society. He laughs at them, so he doesn’t have to cry. And that’s what cinema is, isn’t it?(Eduard Waintrop writes for Libération.)