An aspiring female filmmaker in a long distance relationship tries to make an autobiographical film about love in Janja Glogovac’s colourful, almost fairgroundesque feature debut L... kot ljubezen (L... Like Love). Set in the Czech capital, where protagonist Gina studied film, and the capital of Slovenia, where she is from and where her boyfriend still lives, the film is also about a fractured Eastern Europe and how the people there try to live up to a Western ideal – here represented by US film clichés – while trying to retain something of their own identity. The film is thus a willingly schizoid portrait of a generation growing up on a continent where distances count for nothing but some gaps are still impossible to close. The film could score with festivals with late-night programming and could become a cult item on DVD.

Typical of its post-Big Brother approach to self-referential kitsch, the film starts with a voice over that asks if the audience ever had the impression their life was stuck in the wrong movie. Statuesque Gina (Lucija Serbedzija, blond and bland), an aspiring Slovenian filmmaker who studied at the FAMU in Prague, certainly feels this way. Desperately seeking a subject for her first feature project, she finally decides to use her own life as an inspiration for a film about love, even if her lover is in Ljubljana, two countries away.

Her colourful friends from Prague -- all connected to the Aqua discotheque, a drag queen-laden haven of coke-snorting irreverence -- want to help out with her feature film project, including producer Tomas (Davor Janjic), who secretly has a crush on her, his half sister Valentina (Ksenija Misic), who owns the club venue via her grandmother (Iva Zupancic), and her roommate and lover Maja (Labina Mitevska), a photographer whose parentage is a crucial plot point.

Things start to get out of hand when an attempt to raise cash for the production has some unexpected side-effects, including a spectacularly choreographed and photographed car crash that suddenly leaves the filmmakers in the possession of a large quantity of cocaine hidden inside an oversized matryoshka with the effigy of US president Bush.

The not-so-subtle blend of Russian and American iconography runs throughout the film and works as a metaphor of where the former communist countries of Eastern Europe find themselves today. In terms of cinema, the frequent English-language comments taken from genre films as well as cinematic nods to genres and filmmakers as diverse as film noir, Fellini and Baz Luhrmann underline the final victory of the Western ideal, again leaving Eastern Europe with an adoptive iconography that bears little on their own heritage.

Driven by strong female characters, calculated anarchy and a healthy dose of drag queens, the film reminds most strongly of early Almodóvar and to a lesser extent of the work of Emir Kusturica, a filmmaker from the same country as Glogovac at the time of her birth if not today.

The cast led by Serbedzij is serviceable but nothing more (a hammy cameo appearance from Rade Serbedzija notwithstanding), though both the cinematography and the writing are excellent, with several key scenes impressively staged, including a shot of Gina immerged in water and the aforementioned car crash.

The screenplay by Glogovac and Jelena Vukotic often serves up ugly truths wrapped in sardonic humour ("why do we take the whole pig if we only want one sausage," says one coked-out drag queen); contrasts high- and lowbrow in the same scene and keeps things going at a furious speed (the latter sometimes to the detriment of the film’s more sincere dramatic moments).

At least minor cult status seems likely for this unusual and unusually intelligent film.

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