"Small Town, small minds" is the implication in this bitter and depressing satire from the Czech Republic. Opening with a scene from the Bad Old Days of Communist rule, we meet the mayor of the small town, a whale of a man, and his cohorts as they ply a high ranking Communist party official with precious vodka and black-market bacon. So pissed he can't stand up, he issues the stern request to get him a woman, "or at least a crotch". To which one of the men disappears and returns with his wife. She's happy apparently to "give one" for the town. The next shot shows our friends attending the opening of a new building. The bribes worked.

The story moves along to after the Velvet Revolution has taken place in Czechoslovakia and the people of the town are devising ways to cash in on the new era of capitalism. Beer-bellied men talk enthusiastically about their entrepreneurial projects, and dream of the surge of German tourists. The village grocers start an aggressive price war. People return to claim confiscated property now in ruins. A simple-minded farm girl learns the hard way about a get-rich scheme. Everyone licks their chops at the prospect of wealth and self-satisfaction. Given the vote for the first time, a party called the Independent Erotic Initiative is elected in, and they organise a striptease in the local town.

Of course, as the film reiterates heavy-handily, the only effect of capitalism on a small community like this is to turn everyone against each other, leaving them more depressed than they were before.

It's difficult to recall an ensemble of so many unsympathetic characters. This is probably the point and, in this respect, the cast do their job perfectly. However, Jan Kraus's one-note script doesn't get beyond drawing twisted sketches of provincial venality. You expect something more to happen, but it never does.