Eleven comedic vignettes featuring conversations – some important, some less so – held in restaurants over coffee and cigarettes (how quickly time flies – cigarettes are banned in Russia’s restaurants now). The conversations are candid, and even veer into the territory of murder. In the final credits, the director apologizes to Jim Jarmusch, whose work (in the anthology Coffee and Cigarettes, which Jarmusch shot in pieces over many years) Oldenburg-Svintsov is clearly indebted to. Sex, Coffee, Cigarettes’s kinship with Jarmusch’s film extends to the fact that superstars play tiny roles in almost all of the vignettes.

Sex, Coffee, Cigarettes

Genka is an original artist who has just celebrated his fortieth birthday. He rides his bicycle to the fields, where he contemplates the sky. Svetka is a mother of two children who has never known the joys of love. Both live in a remote province. The action of the picture takes place on the eve of the August events of 1991.