Taxi Blues

There's something basically phony about Lounguine's flashy debut feature, which is forever congratulating itself on being so 'daring' in showing the wrong side of Moscow's tracks. It centres on an 'odd couple' relationship between a stolid, seen-it-all cab driver (Zaitchenko) and a wayward, alcoholic Jewish jazz musician (Mamonov), thrown together by one's demand that the other meet his debts (after the musician skips out on paying his cab fare). The director apparently sees this as a paradigm of worker-intellectual relations, but he's too interested in exposing scuzzy life-styles, and wallowing in vodka, crime and sex, to get too tied up in politics. Trouble is, he has no idea at all how to end it. Skip the last 15 minutes, and you might come out with a wry smile.