[critical] Taxi Driver

Synopsis : a Veteran of the Vietnam War, Travis Bickle is a taxi driver in the city of New York. Its meetings at night and the everyday violence of which he is a witness to him are gradually losing the head. It will load soon issue an underage prostitute from her pimps.

Author’s Note

[rating:9/10]

• Release Date : 2 June 1976

• Directed by Martin Scorsese

• Film american

• With Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Harvey Keitel

• Duration : 1h55min

• Trailer :

ARVE Error: id and provider shortcodes attributes are mandatory for old shortcodes. It is recommended to switch to new shortcodes that need only url

Martin Scorsese is part of those living in the shadow of their own icon, for those of whom it is said ” that there is no longer a need for the present “. Before being an imposing figure and staple of american cinema, Scorsese is the director of a talent, crazy, and revelator of actors and actresses great. Taxi Driver is the second encounter film of Scorsese and the man who would become his alter ego in the field, Robert de Niro. The film won the Palme d’or at Cannes in 1976 and receives 4 nominations in major Oscar. Finally, the last element in the foreword (key to ownership of the film) Taxi Driver is the adaptation of The searchers by John Ford (1956).

The common point of the two films is certainly the figure of the veteran. When John Wayne was camping a veteran of the War of Secession (the side of the confederates), De Niro is a veteran of Viet Nam. Scorsese is radically stiffer than Ford. Sleepless and drugged, medicated, Travis Bickle is a taxi driver at night in New York. He walks literally in the different strata of the United States.

We find a Taxi Driver one of the obsessions of Scorsese : how is the composition of the american Nation ?

It is here that the genius of a true Scorsese operates. Robert De Niro portrays a young man lost and at flower of skin. The developer weight of silence the topic of the Viet Nam war, as is so well that it is present in every plan. Scorsese shattered the national myth of the melting pot, the ” do-nation “. Violence appears as the only cement of the american Nation (as an illustration, review the last shot of Gangs Of New York). The veteran is symptomatic of a society that is at once rocked a violence of the absolute and of a mythology of the hero cowboy/marines. A company also frustrated, egalitarian and multi-racial as the New York of the 70’s is in the inability to build a nation at peace. We guess, therefore, the bath of blood the end.

More than the scene (too much ?) famous You talkin’ to me ?, we prefer that the meeting of a candidate in the presidential elections and the taxi driver. Although visual contact was standing by the rear-view mirror, a world separates them. The politician, representative of the people, will be afraid of the extreme violence and frustration of such people. It would be necessary for policies to deny what the american people to bring change. Martin Scorsese employs his greatest talent to realize the gulf that separates the roman national reality.

Scorsese closes his film in a sequence that doesn’t object to criticism. Are we seeing the reality or the fantasy of Travis ? Finally, regardless of. Scorsese is deconstructed the figure of the american hero, especially based on justice, individual and violent.

There is so much to say about this film that a critic is mostly an exercise in frustration. We can extend the discussion in the comments, including the place from tv, media in general, the solitude, the amoralism scorsesien, sexuality, the two figures of Travis (both cowboy and iroquois), the method to show the big Story through the little story…