‘Taxi Blues’ (NR)

There are a lot of ways to look at "Taxi Blues," the new film by Soviet director Pavel Lounguine. You could approach the film, which analyzes the relationship between a brutish taxi driver and a flamboyantly self-destructive Jewish saxophone player in post-glasnost Moscow, as an excoriating expose' of Soviet antisemitism. Or you could see it as a merciless indictment of modern-day Soviet life in general, a portrait of a desperate and hateful society choking itself to death.

It is, in fact, both of these. But those are the subordinate issues, and certainly not what make the film such a prickly, irritating, fascinating experience. The film's two main characters are thoroughly unlikable; it's pure misery spending time with them, and our frustration and sense of alienation is a part of the movie's curious, riveting spell.

What is compelling, aside from the film's aggressive, jagged, repellent energy, is the obsessive nature of the relationship between the driver, Chlykov (Piotr Zaitchenko), and the musician, Lyosha (the Soviet rock star Piotr Mamonov). That relationship begins when Lyosha stiffs Chlykov for what amounts to nearly an entire night of driving. Determined to get his money, the driver tracks down the musician, steals his saxophone as payment, and then, after discovering that it's virtually worthless on the black market, takes on the musician as a sort of indentured servant to make him work off his debt.

What follows is a peculiar exercise in sadomasochism, in which Chlykov attempts to be both reformer and slave master to the free-spirited Lyosha. The sax player, who guzzles vodka when he can get it and cologne when he can't, is meant to represent the spirit of undisciplined, Orphic creativity. Fingering the keys on his instrument with mad ferocity, his spirit is liberated; he transcends everything -- his problems, his poverty, the depressing squalor of Soviet life.

Seeing this, Chlykov feels earthbound and envious; he hates Lyosha's improvisational amorality, his irresponsibility, the conscienceless way in which he uses people. But most of all he hates him for the sublime release his talent provides. There's nothing equivalent to it in his life and, though he says his goal is to turn Lyosha into a "man," what he wants most is to break his spirit, and silence his divine horn.

As the movie progresses, it becomes a fable about the creative spirit, with Lyosha as a kind of vodka-cured Pan, whose life-enhancing music is being muted by a repressive society. The performances aren't like any we're used to; they're outrageously expressionistic, with almost a punk rawness, especially in Mamonov's work. This is a remarkable characterization, but, like the rest of the movie, a rough one to take. As an actor, he is completely charmless, yet mesmerizing; I can't think of another performer who has made me feel such a mixture of revulsion and attraction. He sails off in his own rabid orbit.

As Chlykov, Zaitchenko is more workmanlike, but he shows how the taxi driver's struggling thoughts bounce dumbly off the inside of his skull. Lounguine doesn't present Chlykov as a cross section of Soviet prejudices; he's made him much more grounded and specific, in just the same way that he has given a harshly vivid sense of detail to the everyday conditions of Soviet life. As an experience, "Taxi Blues" is way beyond the blues, it's about sorrows that sap the marrow.