Peter (Ladislav Jakim) is seventeen in 1964, when the Twist has grabbed all Eastern Europe by its suspenders and things should be Taking Off. Our Peter gets his first job, in a supermarket, but is assigned as a plain-clothes detective to "fink" on customers suspected of shoplifting. This first foray into the adult world of paranoia and bad faith is none too promising (no matter that he is terrible at it and his first suspect turns out to be the manager's friend); it cements his suspicions about his smug father and dashes the latter's hopes for store managerial heights for his son. Peter fares somewhat better in love, but Milos Forman's intimate eye for the awkwardness of youth makes even conquests seem like failures. Jakim seems to be the Czech Jean-Pierre Léaud. But this is a coming-of-age tale set in a very particular moment-the better to comically and painfully delineate the abysmal moral gap between the generations and, by extension, between Stalinist-type communism and...and what?