Troubled and troublesome Russian youth -- and a chance for the Westerner to get on the glasnost bandwagon, or at least to apply some grease to its wheels. More exactly, a chance to enjoy (from any of several political vantage points) seeing the Soviets suffer openly where before they had always appeared so smug and superior; a chance to be patronizing to them in the name of "understanding"; a chance to pretend that what would be a total bore from France or Sweden is made miraculously fresh and vital when it comes from the Soviet Union. In order to be up to this opportunity, though, it would seem to be necessary to admit to having swallowed a certain quantity of the official propaganda to which Westerners have always supposed themselves to be immune. How else to register the proper surprise over the revelation that Russian parents sometimes have difficulties disciplining their teenagers? that Russian teenagers are prone to play their radios too loud? that they occasionally indulge in sex before marriage? that they even occasionally remove their clothes when indulging in it? that their parents are accordingly apt to resort to heavy drinking and to the same clichés ("What will the neighbors think?" etc.) uttered by the parents of teenagers from Tokyo to Topeka? All these revelations and more are portrayed by director Vasily Pichul in a manner so unrelentingly and flauntingly "real" (read "squalid") that it can never take the time to be also believable. With Natalya Negoda and Andrei Sokolov. (1988) — Duncan Shepherd
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