zardoz12 Review of Taxi Blues

Taxi Blues (1990)

Leonard Maltin sees an intellectual dissident, I see a drunk. (SPOILERS!)

[15 August 2002]

In his "Movie & Video Guide", Mr. Maltin (or one of his reviewers) writes of the musician in "Taxi Blues": "... the latter, who embodies the spirit of the oppressed Soviet artist-intellectual, plays his saxophone solos to block out the reality of his existence." It is true that the man sits in reveries, playing sax solos in his head, and is a brilliant musician. But it is more evident that he has a deep love affair with the bottle: the first time we see him, he is drunk; he goes to jail twice for his lubricated actions; he is homeless because his girlfriend threw him out over it; he has lost gigs due to his flaky behavior. In a nation of future AA members, Zaitchenko's character stands out because he has a talent, and is quickly destroying it. This is why the taxi driver is important; in his own crude way he tries to stabilize the drunk, and he is our window through which we see the sax player. We also get to see the outskirts of Moscow: the dump, seedy allyways, the brutalist apartment complexes, grimy little jails with rebar for cell bars. Truly a time capsule of Muscovite life before everything ended.