8/10
Welcome to Lithuania!
18 March 2017
I watched this film because I study Lithuanian, and I really liked it. Maybe the reason is, I spend a lot of my time in Vilnius, and this movie has caught its true spirit. Not the spirit of tourist attractions in the historical center, but the spirit of suburbs and "sleeping districts", where people are mostly not originally from the city. Other reviewers are complaining about dialogues, but that's exactly how I felt about talking to Lithuanians before Vilnius became such a huge tourism destination, and before I learned when to speak Russian and when to speak English, and when it's better to pretend that you know Lithuanian (which has several dialects that are also a subject of mockery sometimes). This film is exactly about this - communication failures between strangers who try to belong in a world which is weird by itself. Also, other reviewers tend to not understand social differences between characters (hence, old-fashioned clothes as a marker of a poor family). Maybe the film is not brilliant altogether, but many of its so-called weak points are actually moments of truth.
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