Well this is Harold Pinter. If you know his work you'll know what to expect. The feel is a combination of someone slipping into complete insanity vs. alien abduction with a little hyperbole in between.

Rufus is a cab driver in London sent by his dispatcher who apparently does not know him, to collect a fare at Victoria Station. Only Rufus can't go because Rufus already has a fare. A woman who has fallen asleep in the back seat and not given him specific instructions about where to take her. So he has chosen to park next to The Crystal Palace until she awakens when he vows he will ask her to marry him as he's fallen in love with her. Never mind that the Crystal Palace burned in 1936. Not for Rufus.

Victoria Station is an interesting little bit of drama about the nature of reality and how we perceive our place in it. Rufus must have loved it because you never see his face until the very last frames--you see bits of him, eyes, mouth, hands, but not his full face. Your only real connection, like the dispatcher is through that wonderfully expressive voice.

I loved it. I'm a theatre geek. I thought it was a very ingenious use of film and theatre. I like the ambiguity at the end and not understanding if the driver has actually disappeared into the past or if he's lost his mind. I like the ever increasing hysteria of the dispatcher. I like the backdrop of modern day London and the allusion that the cabbie has somehow broken with reality to travel back into the past--there is a lovely shot of a radio tower and the crystal palace sort of superimposed over each other.

Another grown-up Rufus pick, complicated, expressive, romantic, left of center and a bit dark. There seems to be a pattern emerging here.

maxx ~