‘Taxi Blues’ ’ Wild Ride From Moscow to the Oscars : Movies: The film deals with anti-Semitism and the rising strains of fascism in Soviet society--but the Soviets have nominated it for an Academy Award.

When “Taxi Blues,” the Soviet Union’s candidate for the 1990 best foreign-language film Oscar, premiered in Moscow last summer, extra police had to be called in to hold back the crowd, and the pleading for spare tickets began more than a block from the October Theater. Footage of the premiere went straight onto the nightly news, and the ovation in the theater lasted long after the lights came up.

A Soviet film sensation had been born.

The best-director prize that “Taxi Blues” won at the Cannes Film Festival earlier brought it instant fame, and the elastic-faced charisma of Piotr Mamonov, lead singer of the now-defunct Sounds of Mu, guaranteed that the entire adolescent population of the Soviet Union would flock to see it.

Vladimir Chekasin’s untamable saxophone on the soundtrack would pull in the jazz crowd, and the scenes of drunken debauchery that soak the film with vodka--and after-shave, which the alcoholic anti-hero gulps when he gets desperate--would grab the muzhiks , the Russian peasants-at-heart.

The jury at Cannes affirmed the film’s artistic merit but, at home, “Taxi Blues” had political impact as well, as the first feature film to touch on anti-Semitism and the rising strains of fascism in Soviet society.

Pavel Lounguine, who makes his directing debut with “Taxi Blues,” maintains that he wasn’t out to make a political statement with his tale of the twisted friendship between a vengeful Soviet taxi driver and a Jewish saxophonist-sot who is so brilliant he “talks to God.”

“I just wanted to tell a story,” says the 41-year-old Lounguine, a rotund bear of a man with a beard and a warm sense of humor. “I don’t know what I wanted to say.”

But he acknowledges that “the film is about the roads to fascism.

“We live in a time when the old has been destroyed and the new hasn’t yet appeared, and millions of people don’t know how to live. One of the dangers of this life is the turning to violence, to kill instead of to speak.”

Taxi driver Ivan Chlykov pumps a primitive set of weights and uses his muscles to terrorize the saxophonist, depicted by Mamonov, enslaving him until the musician can pay off a debt incurred during a drunken spree.

Chlykov’s anti-Semitism is crude and not especially pronounced: He remarks that he didn’t think Jews drank, and at one point complains that the good old days when Jews were too cowed to speak up have passed, and now they’re busy composing music, writing books and trying “to teach us how to live.”

Lounguine says the current rise in anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union worries him, and his next film, about an 18-year-old who finds himself involved in a nationalist group like the infamous Pamyat, will address the issue more directly. But “Taxi Blues,” he insists, “is not a film about Jews. It’s a film about lost people.”

Lounguine does his Soviet audience a great favor by not pushing more messages on them about the horrors of Stalinism, the horrors of war or the horrors of current everyday life. For all its political nuances, “Taxi Blues” is an intimate film focusing on individuals--a novelty for viewers used to decades of good-guy, bad-guy communist morality plays and, more recently, the unadulterated gloom of filmmakers allowed to expose their country’s evils for the first time.

“In these times, I wanted a life-affirming film more and more, with some optimism,” the director says. “I don’t see a political way out” of the Soviet Union’s turmoil. “I only see a human way out.”

Not everyone sees “Taxi Blues” as a positive influence, however.

In a blistering review in Soviet Culture, a newspaper normally noted for its liberal articles, cinema professor Rostislav Yurenev denounced the film for extolling the decadence it should condemn.

“The film doesn’t have any definite idea,” Yurenev wrote. “It doesn’t reveal the sins, problems and faults of our society, but rather propounds them, propagandizes them, emphasizing and exaggerating them.”

Yurenev branded the movie “immoral” and, in a throwback to the old-style ideology that branded jazz as corrupting, commented that the saxophonist’s psyche could conceivably have been damaged by the “shrieking, hysterical, disharmonic, destructive” music he improvised.

The article may have backfired, however.

Yurenev’s complaints that “Taxi Blues” shows “the depressive, limitless consumption of vodka, beastly beatings and animalistic sexual mating” could serve more as an advertisement than a warning in these permissive times.

Lounguine dismissed the Yurenev review. He could afford to, with distribution sales brisk and bookings already set in key U.S. markets. The film was a French-Soviet co-production with help from the American-Soviet Film Initiative and shot on a budget of about $1.3 million, Lounguine said. He basically created his own production network and studio for the film.

Despite its successes at Cannes and at home, Lounguine says he was surprised that “Taxi Blues” was chosen as the Soviet Union’s official entry in the Academy Awards. That’s an honor he says usually goes to more established directors and political insiders.

“Our cinema is really Middle-Aged, I mean medieval,” he says. “The well-known directors are like nobles, with little groups of directors and critics around them. I’m really someone from nowhere, I don’t know anybody.”

Also contributing to this story was Times Staff Writer Kevin Thomas in Los Angeles.