10/10
sexual awakening in the time of political upheaval
14 November 2017
Following the Summer of Love in 1967, 1968 was vastly different. The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and Bobby Kennedy, the student uprising in Paris, the protest at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the massacre of protesters in Mexico City right before the Olympics got held there, all culminating in Nixon's election.

Goran Paskaljević's "Varljivo leto '68" ("The Elusive Summer of '68" in English) indirectly looks at this. The protagonist is Petar, a teenage boy in Yugoslavia. His dad, while a Marxist, is nonetheless the type who thinks that the younger generation doesn't appreciate what the parents' generation did (sort of an Archie Bunker in that sense). Petar is flunking Marxism in school, due to his interest in women. This ranges from his teacher, to a young woman in a bakery (resulting in the movie's best scene). But this is all amid the turbulent events that took place that summer. Early in the movie the family sees the Paris uprising on the news, and towards the end there's news that the Warsaw Pact armies have entered Prague.

I'd say that this story could've taken place in almost any country. It's well known that the '60s were all about sexual awakening and protests, much of it scorned by the parents' generation. Indeed, the movie shows some of the protests that took place in Yugoslavia. We even hear "The Blue Danube" played while the family is on the beach (I wonder if this was a reference to "2001: A Space Odyssey").

Anyway, it's not a masterpiece, but still worth seeing. I don't know how widely available it is; I saw it online.
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