A young forty-year-old surgeon Oleg Volkov has been appointed to the post of chief physician of the maternity hospital, who is trying to change the abortive consciousness of society at least at the level of his maternity hospital, where, in addition to childbirth, abortions are also performed - as elsewhere in Russia.
Uzbek citizen Yury Derbenev is sent to work in Moscow to raise money for the treatment of a seriously ill daughter. His profession, however, is inappropriate: Yury Alexeevich is a teacher of Russian language and literature. And by nationality he is Russian. After many ordeals and misfortunes into which the capital plunged him, Yury is faced with a choice: to go to kill and save his own daughter or remain an honest person.
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.
