On November 23, 2024, the festival Freeze staged a late-autumn collision of mood, memory, and motion: a program built around Clémence Audiard’s steady, uncompromising gaze on urban solitude, a revisitation of Taxi Driver’s electric moral vertigo, and an undercurrent—thick and stubborn—of what it might mean to be “better” in a world that insists otherwise. The evening felt less like a screening and more like a diagnostic: a close-reading of the frayed ethics of modern life, scored in neon, cigarette ash, and sudden generosity.
Taxi Driver: righteous rage, cinematic vertigo A program that includes Taxi Driver inevitably carries a different weight. Martin Scorsese’s 1976 classic remains a brutal catechism on isolation and the fantasies of moral cleansing. Freeze presented Taxi Driver not as nostalgia but as a counterpoint to Audiard’s quieter humanism: where Audiard shows failed intimacies, Taxi Driver stages an eruptive, violent attempt to fix perceived decay. freeze 23 11 24 clemence audiard taxi driver xx better
Urban Interiority: The pairing aimed to render "urban interiority honestly without fetishizing spectacle". Freeze 23/11/24 — Clémence Audiard, Taxi Driver, and
Clémence Audiard has stated in a 2023 interview (prior to the alleged screening) that her favorite genre is the "male meltdown" film, but she finds it "unfinished." She said: The protagonist is a woman (played by up-and-coming