Taxi Libre
2011 · 12m · Canada
Directed by Kaveh Nabatian
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: darkly comic, melancholic
A Mexican university professor now driving a taxi in Montreal struggles with exile and daily life, made harder by a hard-drinking guardian angel.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A guardian angel who drinks—sure, subvert the celestial helper trope, but the film doesn't push hard enough into the absurdity; it keeps one foot in sincere immigrant melancholy when it should go full fever dream.
The tonal balance between elegy and dark comedy sits firmly in the tradition of Kaurismäki and the Montreal school, though the execution doesn't quite achieve the formal precision those precedents demand.
That choice to make the angel drunk instead of wise—to literalize spiritual abandonment through the guardian's own deterioration—is the hinge the whole film turns on, and Nabatian commits to it completely, making exile feel both cosmic and petty.