08/11/2023 - Stergios Paschos’s second feature tracks a dangerous cab driver who also nurses literary aspirations

Like a fair number of films, The Last Taxi Driver is fundamentally about a clash of generations. The title character, Thomas (Kostas Koronaios), engages in some extraordinarily risky and alarming behaviour, yet we can understand him, if not sympathise with him, in motivational terms, feeling his yearning to be young again, and the lost potential he’s mourning.

Similarly to Travis Bickle in Scorsese’s classic, he is the roving night owl whose spontaneous interactions amidst his working hours lead to damaging obsessions, perhaps taken to an additional level as we learn of his thwarted dreams to be a great writer. Showing in Thessaloniki’s competition, this sophomore effort from Greek director Stergios Paschos – following up on his Locarno-premiering Afterlov [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Stergios Paschos
film profile] – engages and antagonises, holding our attention just so we can see how Thomas might demean himself next.

His first fare of the film creates a sequence with a nicely clipped, surreal tone. Manning his old-fashioned cab at an oddly slow pace, with the streets equally devoid of traffic, he’s able to have a good chat with a passenger of similar late middle age, as they commiserate on the country’s ongoing economic travails and the attendant continued dependence of their children on them. Yet this is only a precursor, and self-administered last rites, to the fare tragically shooting himself upon departing the cab, following an argument about the correct fare, which in hindsight seems like a poignant deflector of his real despair. 

Thomas steals a handsome wad of cash from the man’s leather briefcase, leaving the reporting of the suicide to others. Returning to the roadside where a memorial of flowers has been set up, he’s introduced to his passenger’s estranged daughter Eleni (Klelia Andriolatou). With her being unable to acknowledge the death formally, the two of them go out for an impromptu wake, which concludes with a sexual encounter. But with Eleni established in a seemingly steady relationship with her boyfriend Andreas (Ektoras Liatsos), Thomas keeps making advances, seeing the overall happenstance of recent events supplying the sense of coincidence that makes for great narrative. In the earlier part of his life – before supporting a family, we imagine – he worked in book publishing, made translations and wrote some poetry; this man is truly mistaking sociopathy for self-actualising.

Paschos’s dedication to audience discomfort, and making our focal character so off-putting, has its integrity, yet he’s also responsible for a flaw that ultimately capsizes his work. There’s a slippage between finding Thomas merely persistent, and the events taking leave of reality, as Eleni is far more tolerant of him than we’d expect – really, his behaviour should result in him being mercilessly blanked and ignored. There’s a temptation to explain this by way of the filmmaker seeking a heightened tone of awkwardness and social comedy, but that feels like a strained excuse.

A telling moment arises when Thomas finally alights upon, and lies his way into, Eleni’s workplace: it turns out she’s a magazine writer, at the kind of “campus”-style office where ageing millennials set their Mac laptops down on communal tables, rather than in cubicles. We feel a certain screw turn in Thomas’s heart. Bless his soul – he’s truly one of recent cinema’s creepiest guys.

The Last Taxi Driver is a Greek production staged by Filmiki, which is also in charge of its international sales.