Taxi Blues (1990)
Review/Film Festival;
Moscow Without Tears, But Plenty of Humiliation


By JANET MASLIN
Published: October 1, 1990
The New York Times


From its first nighttime shot of a boisterous, glittering Moscow, Pavel Lungin's superb tragicomedy ''Taxi Blues'' presents a Soviet Union that is new to the screen. Even without the rollicking byplay that temporarily unites the film's two central characters, a debauched Jewish musician and a bitter, tormented, vaguely anti-Semitic cabby, '''Taxi Blues'' would be a haunting travelogue filled with raw, pitiless glimpses of a troubled society.

As it is, Mr. Lungin makes these insights integral to his film's remarkable character study. The story's dreamy, alcoholic intellectual and its brutish, pent-up laborer play out their class conflicts and shared longings against a backdrop that eloquently mirrors their unhappiness, and hints at the forces behind it. The blind way in which the principals lash out at each other makes their frustration that much more wrenching in the end.

Amazingly, in view of its underlying mournfulness, ''Taxi Blues'' is a robust and even buoyant film. Mr. Lungin, who won the best-director's prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival for this debut feature, gives his rude, sprawling film tremendous vitality. And he displays vast sympathy and affection for two small figures so thoroughly hamstrung by their own rage.

The first of these, the jazz musician nicknamed Lyosha (Pyotr Mamonov), directs his loathing primarily at himself. Lyosha is first seen messily carousing with a group of party-hopping Moscow swells, and monopolizing the services of Chlykov (Pyotr Zaichenko), a stonily impassive cabby, whom Lyosha insists on patronizing.

''Honest folk with clear eyes - you're our only hope,'' he says soggily, in vain hopes of starting a conversation with the driver. Then a would-be compliment: ''You'd thrive in sub-zero weather in Siberia without matches.'' Chlykov remains indifferent to his passenger's every gambit until finally, when the other passengers have trailed off, Lyosha goes too far. After a long and expensive evening, he tries to disappear without paying his fare.

At first the enraged Chlykov tries to cope with this affront the way he copes with most things: through strenuous, bullheaded exercise. It doesn't help. Chlykov winds up stalking his passenger to the jazz club where Lyosha sometimes plays, glaring suspiciously at the musicians and dancers in his path as he charges down the hallway. He confronts Lyosha, who behaves as if mornings after like this are nothing new, and he appropriates Lyosha's saxophone as collateral.

Chlykov takes the saxophone back to the rugged, much less rarefied atmosphere in which he ordinarily lives. In the back room of a cab station, which serves as car wash, steam bath and bar (under-the-counter alcohol is ubiquitous, as is heavy drinking), he has no luck in trying to fence such a thing.

Nor is he successful at the butcher shop where his girlfriend works, a shop where the butcher warns the staff, ''Don't sell all the pork.'' Meat is dispensed on the sly here, as part of the stream of covert business transactions that is everywhere throughout the film. Chlykov hoards extra automobile tires in his grimy one-room flat; used clothes are eagerly traded; vodka is sold in alleys to long lines of eager customers. The pinups seen on walls are as apt to be Mercedes-Benzes as sexy women.

Chlykov quickly decides that he would rather have the musician himself than his instrument. And so he turns Lyosha into a virtual slave. To work off the debt, Lyosha is eventually forced to give up his Western clothes, sent to work at the airport carrying bags and put through many other humiliations. Oddly enough, he doesn't entirely mind. A lost soul himself, he is almost grateful for the harsh glare of Chlykov's attention.

As these two men, shackled together by circumstance, careen through the film's disheveled settings, they engage in lively debate. ''Even Jews sell out for booze?'' asks the disbelieving Chlykov, to a Lyosha who is so desperate for a drink that he's ready to try aftershave. Lyosha replies, ''You drove us to it.'' This kind of camaraderie, bridging vast social gaps and inchoate prejudices, is fragile at best. The film never forgets that a truce this delicate can easily crumble.

''Taxi Blues,'' which will be shown at 9:30 tonight and at 6:15 P.M. tomorrow at the New York Film Festival, reflects the influence of the West in many ways, from the American musicians who arrive in Moscow to expedite the story's ending to the American flag that an enraged Chlykov tears off the shirt of a rebellious Moscow teen-ager. Equally Western, no doubt, are the choice of a taxi driver as the story's volatile character and the film's wry view of television as something greatly exalted, almost divine. But since the cabby keeps a smoked fish in his car for impromptu snacks, the film's Russian roots are not in question.



Taxi Blues
Direction and screenplay by Pavel Lungin; in Russian with English subtitles; photography by Denis Yevstigneyev; edited by Elizabeth Guido; music by Vladimir Chekassine; a MK2 Productions Release. At Alice Tully Hall, as part of the 28th New York Film Festival. Running time: 110 minutes. This film has no rating.

Lyosha . . . Pyotr Mamonov
Schlikov . . . Pyotr Zaichenko
Old Nechiporenko . . . Vladimir Kachpur
Christina . . . Natalya Kolyakanova
Hal Singer . . . Hal Singer
Nina . . . Yelena Safonova