The Carriage Driver

Nosrat Karimi’s 1971 film about ‘marriage Iranian style’ – a kind of commedia all’iraniana.

Complications and hijinks ensue when the marriage of young lovers Morteza and Pouri becomes predicated on Morteza approving the marriage of his recently widowed mother to Pouri’s father. The Carriage Driver masterfully draws on Italian pink neorealism, Iranian filmfarsi and Czechoslovakian cinema – the last of which informs a dream sequence and a surprising use of animation thanks to the director’s education in Prague. Karimi offers a sharp, though good-hearted, critique of Iranian society, using its prejudices around namus (the virtue of the female members of the family) as a basis for comedy, and poking fun at such commonplace rituals as burials, marriage and circumcision ceremonies.