Malenkaya Vera

This once notorious drama (at least in its own country) was hailed as a breakthrough when first released simply for daring to show modern Soviet life without the usual State-approved propaganda halo, in all its actual anti-bureaucratic grubbiness. But watching the film on this side of the erstwhile Iron Curtain only reinforces the notion that Soviet youth culture is thirty years behind the rest of the world: despite the often oppressive details it might be just another quaint teen delinquency relic from early 1960s Hollywood, dubbed into Russian and updated with casual sex and drug abuse. In other words, it's hardly a revelation to discover that Russian kids are just as misunderstood by adults as their American role models. But while the attitudes may look dated to Western audiences, it's at least an honest attempt to portray something of the boredom and defiant posturing of youth, in a country not exactly noted for addressing its generation gap.