Igor Kozhevnikov

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.

A young businessman learns that his former lover died in childbirth and she left a child who is being raised by her sister, who is also in love with him.

A man has died in a mountain village. The bandsmen are forbidden to accompany the deceased to the cemetery. There is a war going on, and this is the border that the locals are not allowed to cross...

Young d'Artagnan comes to Paris to be a musketeer. There, he meets three old musketeers, members of the glorious King's Guard, but actually realizes that they are not the great fighters who he thinks they are. While joining the musketeers he is faced with the hidden plots of Cardinal Richelieu, his spy Milady de Winter, and a possible war against England.

The events take place in New York in the apartment of the mother of the owner of a seafood restaurant, Barney Cashman. The man is already over 40. One fine day he thinks that he has lived a gray, boring life: he has never cheated on his wife, never got into a fight, or gotten involved in any adventure.

A young and handsome prison guard falls in love with a beautiful lady-prisoner. She makes him hooked on sex and manipulates him into becoming a gang member. He kills and steals under her control.

Ira is Russian. Ivan Tashkov, too. She is 23 years old, lives in Geneva with her mother and knows very little about her homeland. Tashkov is a supposed gangster of the Russian mafia, and is in jail waiting to be judged. Ira, who is searching for her roots and her own path in life, happens to be the interpreter of Tashkov's defense lawyer, and gets instantly captivated by of this powerful, cultured and manipulative man.