Taxi Blues

Shlykov drives a taxi in Moscow: hardworking, quarrelsome, on the side of order and closed in on himself. One night a saxophonist named Lyosha gets into his car; drunk, in debt, chaotic and without money. Shlykov goes after him to get paid and ends up trying to put him to work and make a man of him. The two attach themselves to each other, but it is not friendship; it is one of them trying to control the other. Pavel Lungin writes and directs. Pyotr Zaychenko plays Shlykov and Pyotr Mamonov plays Lyosha. Mamonov really was a musician, one of the known figures of the Soviet underground rock scene of the eighties, and the performance carries material from his own life. It was made in the last year of the Soviet Union. The narrative does not take the collapsing country as its subject, yet that dissolution is in every scene: the queues, the black market, the drink, and nobody knowing what comes next. The tension between the two men is also one of class and identity; worker and artist, Russian and Jew, order and disorder. Pavel Lungin took the best director award at the Cannes film festival in 1990 for this film. Who it is for: viewers who like late Soviet cinema and hard character driven drama. Who it is not for: both characters are exhausting, the narrative arrives nowhere, and the tension never drops through the tone.