From the trailer and review of the movie, one thing is clear - the ambition of the creators is to combine two recent fashions in (Eastern) European cinema. On the one hand, they try to ride the recently realized bitter-sweet nostalgic wave of reminiscence of the communist past of the region. On the other hand, the movie aims to disclose the post-communist disorientation of the "lost generation" of young people, who graduated from high-school in the last years of socialism; their moral decay under the pressure to die hungry or join the still existing mafia networks between the ex-socialist structures and the their criminal extensions.
"The Rebel of L" does not live up to its two ambitious aims. Despite the celebrity cast, the dark stories told and excessive violence displayed, the plot is flat and lacks any message, morale, or, for that matter, suspense. The pre-1989 imprisonment of the young Dinko 'Loris' (L.)Hadzhidinev, who tries to emigrate from Bulgaria in 1986, are not justified; the reason of his escape seems to be his 'restless heart', and 'pride'; the conditions of life in socialist Bulgaria (one of the most brutal and repressive regimes in the former Soviet Bloc), serve simply as a nostalgic and rosy background to the rebel of the young lad; without the necessary mediation, the socialist paraphernalia on display fall short of serving any other purpose, but the Post-Soc version of Holocaust kitsch. The sequence to the prison episode, Loris's post-communist adventures as an employee of his former prison supervisor, and his love story with the Russian prostitute Larissa, are equally not justified. Furthermore, the mafia connections of the former army men with the new-rich in Bulgaria lack any substantial explanation and are thus short of explanatory potential or a clear message about large-scale processes in the Bulgarian society.
Unfortunately, "The Rebel of L." is symptomatic: it displays a great flaw of recent Bulgarian cinema: 18 years after the beginning of the Bulgarian transition, the ways to speak about (or against) the actors and act of the last years of communism and the still born transition are less and less daring. The subtle irony and the coded language of movies made under the repressive censure of the communist regime is missing ostensibly. The only thing that remains the same is the poor cinematography, the old-school acting ala-Stansilavski, and the bitter taste for all Bulgarians, that they should still value and rate highly such products of the Bulgarian cinema, because they don't have much choice, really.
