LITTLE VERA Movie Review

Malenkaya Vera

Natalya Negoda stars in this punkish blast of western-style rebellion, a 1988 harbinger of the soon-to-follow Soviet upheaval. Negoda (a lively, pretty actress) plays a young working-class woman in Ukraine who smokes, drinks, has sex with her boyfriend, wears leather, loves rock and roll, lives with her parents, and ridicules the system. Just as in American youth-rebel movies, the older generation points an accusatory finger at Vera's wicked ways, but she comes right back at em by zeroing in on their HYPOCRISY, pointing out that all they do is sit around watching TV in their liquor-stained underwear. And they say there's a new world order. Little Vera isn't much of a movie, but it's comforting social history. (It also proves that we live in One World when it comes to movie marketing, too; as part of her dedicated belief in glasnost, Negoda posed nude for Playboy to boost Little Vera's American ticket sales.)

NEXT STOP … Rebel without a Cause, Look Back in Anger, Taxi Blues

1988 130m/C RU Natalia Negoda, Andrei Sokolov,Yuri Nazarov, Ludmila Zaisova, Alexander Niegreva; D: Vassili Pitchul. VHS, LV FCT, LUM, WBF