Peeping Tom With the fall of the communist regime and the arrival of capitalism in the country, all the charms and “charms” of the free market flooded into Czechoslovakia. Among them was a stream of very peculiar “tourists” (primarily from neighboring Germany), whose main goal was not to see the Charles Bridge firsthand. They searched for – and found at Grand Central Station and in local nightclubs – street children, boys from difficult families and unemployed young people willing to do much for a small monetary reward, selling their bodies so as not to starve (or to lose all the money on slot machines). It was these boys 14-20 years old, in the 90s hundreds besieging the cereal places of Prague, became the heroes of the documentary film of Viktor Grodetsky.
But despite the acute social theme, the author seems to have failed to avoid deliberate sensationalism and pretentiousness. Same type, sometimes piquant questions to each of the interviewees, fixing on the frank and base instead of a more complete disclosure of the social background or the prerequisites for becoming on the path of prostitution - all this makes the viewer, following the director and his camera, a little peeping tom.
This sense of voyeurism is only amplified by a number of strange artistic decisions of the documentary filmmaker - a foam-filled bath in which one of the film's heroes sits; close-ups of older men, for some reason depicting potential clients of guys; sudden camera passes through blurred photos, in which pornography on the edge (beyond?) of the law is still guessed. And (perhaps the main dubious place of the film) the monologues of Ondra are either a really self-contradictory pimp, or a hired actor in order to enhance the dramatic effect and permeate the scattered fragments of the film with a common thread.
But in the end, it seems to me, the author almost achieves the opposite – the viewer ceases to take the stories of the boys themselves at face value. Do they not exaggerate their feats in the field of escort services in confession on camera? Their views seem to say otherwise.