As the prior poster suggested, this is probably a great flashback for those who were in Hungary in the 1970s (or later, and wonder what it was like then). It's interesting as an equivalent to the kinds of films that were made a few years earlier in North America, mostly in the immediate wake of "Easy Rider," showing footloose youth just traveling, "finding themselves," and getting into underplotted mild trouble. Most of those movies weren't very good (save as timepieces), and this isn't very good either, except in the novelty of offering a similar, seemingly apolitical view behind the Iron Curtain, where we assume life for youth wasn't so footloose. But as presented here, it looks much the same, albeit a little drabber--the street life and beach scenes here are hardly golden California vistas, with plenty of corpulent and middle-aged folk glimpsed. The protagonist seems to get a certain amount of hostility from strangers at times, apparently just for being young and long-haired. But there's no mainstream/counterculture division spelled out, and indeed you don't get much sense that there's any real deprivation going on here for anyone--our trucker protagonist considers signing on for more ambitious routes that would apparently let him visit Western and other Eastern European nations without any trouble.
As a snapshot of the era, "Kangaroo" is intriguing enough, but unless you have some personal interest in the time and place, there just isn't a lot here to compel attention. The hero has pleasant-enough looks and personality, but that's about the most one can say; he hasn't got any special charisma, and isn't a striking camera subject. Why do all these very pretty girls keep turning up and throwing themselves at him? It would make sense if the film were a standard young man's fantasy of the period, in which girls do that sort of thing because that's what male audiences (and filmmakers) would want them to do. But this movie purports to be fairly realistic, so it rings false. Nor do we understand why he doesn't brush off the teenager who's infatuated with him, as he doesn't want to be tied down at his age and justifiably sees her as immature. When he changes his mind, there are some plot mechanizations that might have guilt-tripped (or shotgun-wedding'd) him into it, but not into simply starting to love her. She is all too credibly clingy and hysterical in ways that might well simply be the emotional fever of a 17-year-old, soon to pass. As a result, the "happy ending" feels like a mistake--do these people really belong together? Will they even like each other in another couple years?
"Kangaroo" doesn't dig deep enough to ask such questions. It's breezy in a way that may well have seemed refreshing to local audiences at the time--I can't say I have a strong grip on how different it might have been from the general Hungarian cinema of 1976. But now it just seems too casual about narrative and character to offer more than a Polaroid of moderetely hippie-ish (but still gainfully employed) youth in that milieu, without much context that would make it meaningful to foreign (or latterday) viewers. It's well-made, but there just isn't much substance here to take away with you.
