As a director, Pavel Lungin represents one of European cinema’s greatest unsung talents – a visionary craftsman with an unapologetically innovative and idiosyncratic world view – which probably explains why several of his features have never secured stateside release. The filmmaker, a Russian Jew from Moscow who took his directing bow about 18 years ago at the ripe old age of 41 (after years of authoring screenplays), did so with the assistance of European megaproducer Marin Karmitz (also responsible for backing Louis Malle’s apotheosis Au Revoir les enfants). The resultant debut, Taxi Blues, won Lungin the Best Director Award at Cannes in the spring of 1990. I screened the movie for the first time this week and felt blindsided by how emotionally uncompromising it feels and by the multi-layered sophistication of the narrative. For those in the mood for something a little bit different than the usual video store haul, this one’s worth a look.

On the surface, the film observes the unplanned acquaintanceship that gestates between two strikingly different Muscovites: a burly and thickset, rage-filled Russian cabbie named Schlikov (Piotr Zaitchenko) and a wiry, gap-toothed Russian Jewish sax player named Lyosha (Petr Mamonov) who makes the pivotal mistake of stiffing Schlikov for a 70 ruble fare after a drunken night on the town. What emerges from the meeting of these polar opposites is a relationship in which the men reconnoiter again and again, with seemingly no end in sight. And yet, to tag it as a “friendship” would veer into overstatement; the men behave far too brutally and dysfunctionally to one another to give the dynamic even the semblance of the kind and gentle aura connoted by the word “friend.”

Schlikov initiates the first several re-encounters with Lyosha (even after seizing the man’s horn as collateral and using it to generate offers that are worth several times the lost cab fare) and because he does, seemingly without externalized prompting from instance to instance, it takes one a little while to determine the pattern of the men’s behavior. What Lungin essentially gives us in Schlikov is a demented, sadistic (and, one guesses, self-loathing) character who desperately needs someone to pummel, belittle, and harass like a playground bully – an outlet, we can guess, for his not-so-latent anti-Semitism that crops up unchecked in his words from time to time. The cabbie’s decision to invite Lyosha to room with him (early in the picture) provides as much of a deep-seated, incisive comment on this as Lyosha’s decision to stick around for the incessant browbeating of this insolent monster. And yet, Lyosha himself is far from spotless – fully hedonistic and a thorough user, he’s content to take full advantage of Schlikov (badgering him for money, ransacking the cabbie’s apartment during the day for booze, insensitively flooding the man’s building with bathwater by leaving the tap on). Schlikov doesn’t let either man off easily: the culpability, here, flows both ways.

The film does not (as you may have guessed by now) proffer an event-driven narrative; Lungin uses screen time to explore the contours of this odd and depressing, yet extremely unusual (almost sadomasochistic) relationship between the two men, and as a writer-director, he’s fascinated by it, intrigued to no end by it. He gains depth and thematic resonance from the period in which the story unfolds: shot in 1989 and issued in 1990, it was produced just as the Iron Curtain began to fall. As such, the film takes on an allegorical dimension; Schlikov begins to embody the old, cruel, repressive Stalinist Russia, Lyosha the then-nascent hedonistic Russia, its citizens desperate for sensual pleasures such as western music, haute couture, and wild, self-indulgent living. In that sense, nearly every psychological aspect of the men’s relationship finds a sociological corollary. Therein rests the genius of the film.

The environmental observations of Taxi Blues are also unparalleled; offhand, I cannot think of another feature that provides a more unique or highly specific view of Russian lifestyles in the late 1980s and early 1990s, coincident with the fall of the Soviet Union. The world into which Lungin plunges us is unforgettable: chaotic, anarchic, poverty-stricken, and deeply, profoundly sad, the film’s landscapes speak volumes about a region that was - at the time of production - permanently crossing the threshold from one era to another, but somehow caught helplessly in the middle of a seemingly impossible transition.