A road officer degraded to a simple taxi driver is an initial link in the chain of power which was broken by pure chance. However, it was not so much the existence of such a motive in those years, long before the perestroika, that appeared unusual - it was the attention to the inner world of a man, who percieved the loss of his power as catastrophe of injustice. Sokurov shows with compassion the painful retrieval of the sense of life for the character, by representing - even though a most insignificant one - the same system of power that ordered the destruction of Sokurov's films, forbidding him to show them and continue his work of filmmaker.