X - Taxi Blues

Summary

Shlykov, a right-wing nationalist Moscow cab driver, tracks down an alcoholic Jewish saxophone player, Lyosha, who has failed to pay his fare one evening. Opposites attract and Shlykov's cruel master-slave treatment of Lyosha turns into a strange kind of friendship and, finally, jealousy as Lyosha becomes an internationally renowned jazz musician, planning to move to New York. In the course of the film's story, the viewer is zoomed, dragged, and yanked through a nightmarish world of lowlife and crime that would hardly have appeared on preglasnost screens.

Taxi Blues [Taxi-blues). Directed by Pavel Loungin; screenplay by Pavel Loungin; cinematography by Denis Evstigneev; production design by Vadim Yurkevich; music by Vyacheslav Chekasin. Cast: Pyotr Mamonov, Pyotr Zaichenko, Vladimir Kashpur, and Natalia Kolyakanova. Color, 111 min. Ask- Eurofilm, Lenfilm Studios (USSR)-MK-2 Producion (France), 1990.

10. The penniless, alcoholic – and Jewish – saxophonist Lyosha (Pyotr Mamonov) challenges all that the antisemitic Russian nationalist cabbie Shylkov (Pyotr Zaitchenko) stands for in Taxi Blues (1990), Pavel Loungin's awardwinning French-Russian variation on Mozart and Salieri, set during the twilight of communism. (Photo: Kinocenter and Sovexportfilm.)

For the first time in the history of Soviet film, vignettes, decorated with the fancy Kremlin garlands and depicting the dismal Soviet capital, are labeled with the trademark of a French producer, Marin Karmitz.

Attention to both the East and the West does not tear director Pavel Loungin's Taxi Blues (1990) apart. On the contrary, the pompous grandeur of the Stalinist architecture serves as a setting for the wild bohemian slickness that, as acted out by Pyotr Mamonov, appeals to the West.