User Reviews

"Lude Godine" or "Foolish Years" was a daring attempt to make a teen consciousness film. It's main target was the high school population, which deals with questions of love and sexual relations for the first time. As such, it was something new and promising.

The story of "Lude Godine" revolves around two teenagers, Boba and Marija, who will face the serious issues of teen pregnancy, abortion and the impact left on their families and friends. It's tough going, with many hard decisions and questions, but just like in real life, serious issues urge serious solutions. They will resolve them until the end, but there will be a price to pay. The film is predominantly made as an educational content, and it delivers a powerful message.

"Lude Godine" was a promising title, one of the first of it's kind. Unfortunately, the social aspect was soon dumped, and the sequels that followed watered this concept into a yucky comedic trash, which found it's embodiment in the "Zikina Dinastija" series of films.

Rialda was only 14 years old when this film was made, and her movie boyfriend who got her pregnant, Vladimir, was almost 22. What a couple. This means it could have been a movie about sexual abuse and not a romance about kids of a similar age as it was presented. They don't in fact seem like a natural couple at all.

Vladimir (as a "kid"), that is Boba, gets a minor pregnant, and that's basically what the story boils down to here, so it's not even overly original. The premise is even shadier because he is not likable, neither as an actor nor the character he plays. Vladimir has the face of a hoodlum which makes him far from ideal for this kind of role, because of the whole romantic angle. Why would anybody root for their relationship? One kind of hopes she finds herself a much better, more suitable partner.

Calic assigned Bata Zivotinja the role of an intellectual and a surgeon (which is absurd in itself because he much better suited to play a butcher or a milkman with his working-class appearance).

Sometimes the film is reminiscent of those early 60s/70s educational-instructional films for teenagers regarding the prevention of unwanted pregnancy, rather than a proper piece of fiction. The best aspect of the film is the unintentional stuff: the scenes of 70s Belgrade, because the plot itself is not that interesting. As a comedy, the film offers very little. Genre-wise, it has no clear direction, which is small wonder considering who directed and wrote it...