TV: Padomju džinsi

Having never seen any Latvian TV show or movie, or heard an appreciable
amount of spoken Latvian, my interest was piqued by _Padomju džinsi_
(Soviet Jeans), a recent Latvian TV show, possibly available on a
streaming platform near you.

Riga, Soviet Latvia, 1979.  Three young people: Renārs (Kārlis
Arnolds Avots), a tailor with black market connections; Tiina (Aamu
Milonoff), a Finnish theater director; and Māris (Igors Šelegovskis),
a KGB officer.  They are drawn into a cat-and-mouse game between
an underground factory that produces knock-off Levi's jeans and the
KGB operation to find the source of the subversive pants.  The show
is a dramedy that lays bare the utter corruption of the Soviet
system.

It turns out that the "Latvian" dialogue actually flips back and
forth between Latvian and Russian.  Since I know neither language,
simply distinguishing the two is already an effort for me.  (Akanye
helps.) I assume there are a lot of sociolinguistic details that
I'm missing.  The Finnish character doesn't speak the local languages
either and communicates in English, which is the third major language
of this multilingual TV show.  Interestingly, some of the older
generation Latvian characters occasionally try to fall back to
German.

I'd recommend the show on its own, although I personally never
experienced the Soviet Block, apart from a short trip to Moscow in
1989 as part of the entourage of a diplomatic mission--and what a
depressing experience that was.

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy@mips.inka.de