This is an intelligent, amusing and insightful film. It shows how the Czech Republic appears to have jumped out of the fat and into the fire, caught between the twin evils of the Communist Scylla and the Hyper-Capitalist Charybdis (although a marked difference being they are not being forced at the point of a Soviet gun into the shops!). At the start of the film there is some telling images of how the society has changed - the 1968 Prague Spring, where people rioted against political oppression by Leninists/Stalinists in power, juxtaposed with footage from only a few years ago where the riot police were called in at the opening of a new electric/white goods megastore.
It brings up some ideas again (in my mind anyway) of when anti-capitalists descended on Prague for the IMF/WB showdown five years back. Locals were extremely pissed off at young rich visiting westerners carrying red hammer-and-sickle flags around town, for years a symbol of oppression and misery. In their minds, they wanted anything BUT left politics. Is there an economic/political alternative to squeeze through the middle of both the rampant free market and oppressive state socialism? Five years on, nothing has materialised for the Czechs yet... until then, they'll have to make do like the rest of us, and suffer saturation of advertising and marketing pressure to buy things they dont really need.
