Out of the Republic of Latvia comes this extremely frank documentary about disenchanted Soviet youth who, as one young man says, "grow old, but not mature." J. Hoberman of The Village Voice observed, "A local bombshell that set attendance records across the USSR, Yuris Podniek's (mainly male) generational portrait opens at an outdoor Riga rock concert-a few stony-faced elders lost in a sea of clapping, bouncing teenagers-and goes on to explore the city's youth cult fringe. Clearly, teen anomie is not a SoCal exclusive. The denizens of this Mondo Latvia include hippies, breakdancers, metallasti, punks (who, with their two-tone hair, face paint, and decorative scars, seem to have caught up with Liquid Sky), Hare Krishnas, and drug addicts. Although these malcontents make up a small minority of Soviet youth, Podniek presents them as prophetic. Ignorance of Russian history is endemic, Komosol is worse than irrelevant. The film's most striking absence are traditional socialist values: 'Today there is nothing worth living for or dying for or fighting for,' a young draftee explains. 'Everything seems to be there and yet there is nothing.' " To Western eyes, the film might falsely suggest that teenagers are the same in every culture, just suffering the angst and desperation of youth. However, to Soviet observers, there is the lurking fear that the similarity reveals a rupture in the ethics of Socialism.