Last Holiday

Last Holiday was shown at the San Francisco Film Festival in May 1999. Said to be the first US screening. This is a quintessential teenage bad boys genre film, and very good of the kind. Story follows three lads as they progress from guzzling vodka and smoking dope to robbing the local bar of its disco lights and then on to murder, death by police brutality, prison and more before they have to go back to school. Ya-hoo!!

Director gets superb performances from the teens, photography is fine. The opening shot is memorable - a concrete apartment building in a snowstorm. The camera dollies in from about a block away to an apartment window just as a teenager opens it, and moves on into the apartment where the youth are partying. It's not a bit like Orson Welles in spite of this description, and well worth seeing for its technical brilliance. Story has that firm fatalistic cast that rarely gets beyond international film festivals. Well worth seeing if you enjoy this sort of thing and get a chance. Oh yes, The film is set in mid-Seventies and I think there is another layer that I didn't get - a barbed look at the Motherland just before dissolution.