Mandragora

Notwithstanding the elegant opening shot (of a shop window smashed and looted to the strains of choral music), this account of a teenage runaway who leaves his bullying father and boring home town for the streets of Prague, only to be pushed immediately by a ruthless pimp into a squalid, violent, druggy world of male prostitution and pornography, is pretty hackneyed by Western European standards. Despite the sombre tone, the film tends towards sensationalism, so that its manifest good intentions seldom result in anything more than trite stereotyping.