IS IT EASY TO BE YOUNG?
A film non-review by William Tsun-Yuk Hsu
IS IT EASY TO BE YOUNG? is a documentary on Latvian youth made in the mid-1980s. Unfortunately, the entire film is horribly dubbed, with one droning narrator handling all the voices.
The documentary is in several independent sections, spliced together with little thought for organization or transition. The first and longest section contains numerous clips from an open-air rock concert somewhere in Latvia. Most of the footage is of the largely youthful audience, who could easily be a group of middle American suburban teenagers with colorful T-shirts and jackets, some sporting funky sunglasses. There was a near-riot after the concert. Teenagers trashed the interior of a train, and seven or eight of them were arrested as scapegoats. There is extensive footage of the trial (with some hilarious shots of jurors looking very bored), interleaved with interviews with some of the teenagers involved in the trial. Some of the other sections featured a young man who worked in a morgue (with a one-second shot of an autopsy), a group of Latvian punks complete with studded leather jackets and painted hair (the most anti-social thing they're shown doing is spraying graffiti on an old building), youths helping to renovate an old building, and a film-maker in his late 20s or early 30s.
The last section was (surprisingly) on the war in Afghanistan. The narrative had (understandably) few political undertones, focusing instead on two veterans and their impressions of the war. We are shown clips from a film (made by the young director interviewed earlier). The visual style, imagery and treatments are remarkably similar to music videos on MTV (there is no dialog, only an electronic soundtrack): the same heavy-handed delivery, overblown fantasy images and lighting effects that you'd expect to see from, say, a video by Kansas. (Maybe this has something to do with video pioneer Rybczinski, who made several interesting films in Poland before moving to the US and making MTV videos for Art of Noise and Yoko Ono.)
Overall, the youths interviewed in the documentary seemed to feel that they have all they need, and there is nothing left to work for. Most of all, they seem terminally *bored*. In other words, they are not much different from suburban teenagers in the US. It's amazing how two societies that profess to be so different have produced generations that are so alike in their materialism and apathy.
Bill Hsu
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