Over at All the Anime, I write up Fuminori Kizaki’s Human Lost, a distaff sci-fi adaptation of Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human.
“The year… is ‘Showa 111’ – playfully extending Emperor Hirohito’s imperial era as far as the year 2036. But does this mean that this anime takes place in a world where the Showa Emperor has been ruling for 111 years? Is Hirohito still on the Chrysanthemum Throne, a wizened, cyber-emperor in his thirteenth decade, sustained by dark technologies and underhand upgrades?”
Suomi-Filmi’s reliable director Valentin Vaala helms another script based on a play by Hella Wuolijoki, after the success of his earlier Hulda Juurakko (1937). Niskavuoren naiset is a fire-cracker of a story about another of Wuolijoki’s independent, disruptive female characters. The year is 1931 (so says Wikipedia, although people are seen drinking cognac, in contravention of that period’s Prohibition, still in force until 1932). Aging lady of the manor Loviisa Niskavuori (Olga Tainio) is trying to hold her village together in changing times, enduring with implacable stoicism the petty dramas of her heirs, particularly her performatively consumptive grand-daughter-in-law Martta (Irja Lauttia).
Farm life is presented not as a happy idyll, but as a complex, modern industry; the womenfolk discuss fat percentages and crop yields on their way to the store. This is no clueless place in the sticks – the council is quarrelling over the appointment of a teacher qualified to keep up with the times, and the menfolk have settled on Ilona Ahlgren (Sirkka Sari), a city girl who has “studied more than knitting patterns,” who arrives on the train with her fashionable hat at a jaunty angle.
The locals are relying on Ilona for more than schooling; the priest wants her to help out at Sunday school, the craft circle wants her helping out with the home economics, and even the drama club expects her to take a turn on the stage. They expect her to be a Jill of all trades, a vital contributor to all aspects of village life. She is excited to be in town, not the least because with Woolfian connotation, she has been yearning all her life for “a room of my own.”
Martta’s husband Aarne Niskavuori (Tauno Palo) falls for Ilona, obviously and hard, in a stirring dance sequence in which the camera intercuts extreme close-ups on the band’s musical instruments with the whirling faces of the would-be lovers. But the script keeps us guessing, cutting immediately from breathless flirtations at a summer ball, to a midwinter card game six months later, leaving us to guess what has transpired in the interim.
“Telephone” Sandra (Aino Lohikoski) is the local operator, constantly complaining that the schoolboys have damaged the overhead wires, but also sneakily eavesdropping on everybody’s conversations. It’s she who first suspects that Aarne and Ilona are having an affair, and spearheads the gossip. By the time their trysts are the talk of the town, Ilona is already carrying Aarne’s child. Aarne’s wife, Martta rages against That Woman, refusing to let her in “her house”, a house that as Loviisa dolefully reminds her, is not yet fully hers to rule.
Over a tense coffee conversation loaded with agricultural allusions, Ilona breathlessly talks of spring storms blowing down trees with giddy disregard, while Loviisa sternly reminds her that the men of Niskavuori have deep roots, and that she is a new transplant. Money, in terms of Martta’s wealth, is going to talk much louder than whatever feelings Aarne and Ilona have for each other, but even as the two women glare at each other over their cups and saucers, Aarne arrives with his friend Simola, and the foursome are forced to play along in a forcibly light-hearted conversation about the joys of marriage.
Loviisa has a plan, to marry Ilona to the less well-to-do Simola, avoiding a scandal, or at least squaring off a lesser one by suggesting that Mr Simola and Ilona are facing a shotgun wedding. Ilona’s own vague plan, to run away with her lover, seems thwarted by Aarne’s tardy realisation of his duty to his home manor.
The Women of Niskavuori was the debut role for Sirkka Sari, a young actress with a tragically short career ahead of her. However, ungallant though it may sound, on the basis of this performance, I assume that the ink spilled elsewhere as if she was some great lost talent was a commemoration error, as obituarists struggled to find nice things to say about a frankly unremarkable teenage ingénue, who met with a grisly end while completing her third film, Rich Girl (1939). Naturalism in dialogue is still uncommon in Finnish films of the period, but Sari comes across as an actress out of her depth, too busy trying to remember her lines to really put much effort into delivering them. If she were a star in the making, she seems miscast, here. She was barely eighteen years old when this film was shot, even though the character she is playing must surely be at least five years older, if not ten.
The script is open to multiple interpretations – depending on the way that Ilona’s actress delivers her lines, she could come across either as a fiercely progressive modern woman, or a home-wrecking hussy unheeding of the damage she has done, or a deluded innocent, humped and dumped by a local scoundrel. But Sari persists in staring into the middle distance and softly speaking to nothing, as if she is in a dialogue with the voice of angels and not anyone around her. Meanwhile, Olga Tainio, as the no-nonsense matriarch, runs rings around her with a truly nuanced performance, empathetic with her condition, but steely in her prioritisation of the life and future of the manor.
Loviisa looks down at the old tome we have seen her reading in the opening scenes. It is the Bible, open to the Song of Solomon: “Many waters cannot quench love; rivers cannot sweep it away. If one were to give all the wealth of one’s house for love, it would be utterly scorned.”
The film ends with a tense parlour trial, in which Ilona refuses to name the man whose skis were seen outside her bedroom, while the townsfolk line up a parade of witnesses in order to force her confession. Martta and Loviisa already know who it was, of course, as do we, imparting an element of suspense as we wait not to find out who it was, but what will happen…
“Perhaps,” says Martta hopefully, “we can blame the women for this.” But it was the men of Niskavuori, at the beginning of the film, who were seen guffawing over the prospect that the new teacher might be a bit of hot stuff, deftly illustrating a systemic assumption that makes this film’s concerns ardently up-to-date, even 81 years after its release. As for what happens next, you will have to wait for the belated sequel, Aarne of Niskavuori (1954), although there would be several more films in the Niskavuori series, including the prequel Loviisa: Young Mistress of Niskavuori (1946), in which Palo would return to play his own grandfather. We’ll get to them eventually, although it might take years…
[Note – uncharacteristically, this film came with English subtitles on the DVD.]
Jonathan Clements is the author of An Armchair Traveller’s History of Finland.
“The story is famous, not only for its critical acclaim and awards nods, but because it was considered by Hayao Miyazaki as his next movie project in 1998. When Miyazaki put the idea aside and went on to make the thematically similar Spirited Away instead, Kashiwaba’s illustrator Kozaburo Takekawa publicly accused the Studio Ghibli director of plagiarism.” Ahead of Birthday Wonderland’s UK premiere next month at Scotland Loves Anime, I write it up for All the Anime.
Over at All the Anime, I write up the path to the screen of Kenji Miyazawa:
“It is difficult to overstate the impact of the author Kenji Miyazawa (1896-1933) on Japanese literature, and anime. He was still in his thirties when he died, a largely unknown poet living in provincial obscurity, and only really read outside local newspapers after the publication of a Complete Works a decade later. In the post-war period, which saw most of the Japanese school curriculum bleached and purged of any authors with wartime associations, Miyazawa’s gentle, pastoral tales, suffused with Buddhist imagery, swiftly took root, becoming the set books of an entire generation of schoolchildren.”
“Characters… wear augmented-reality contact lenses, not to enhance their perspective but to deaden it against an onslaught of advertising and distractions. Fujii took this idea to a new level with Hello World (2018), in which hackers develop an ad blocker that can filter out government propaganda. This, in turn, proves to have revelatory and revolutionary implications in several foreign states, where the removal of fake news, spam and subliminal advertising creates conceptual breakthrough of immense consequence.”
Over at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, I contribute an entry on the Japanese author Taiyo Fujii.
Over at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, I write up the remarkable authorial career of Hiroshi Yamamoto, who started out as an elf-girl called Deedlit.
“In any other country’s sf community, an author like Yamamoto might have been the darling of the convention circuit for decades, and a regular sight at awards ceremonies. But in Japan, where his prolixity and varied output is notable but unremarkable, Yamamoto had to wait until Kyōnen wa Ii-nen ni Naru Darō [“Last Year Should be a Good Year”] (2010) to receive a Seiun Award for long-form fiction. Intimately involved in the post-911 zeitgeist, it imagines a world, but more pointedly an America, invaded by androids from the 24th century, determined to stop contemporary conflicts and terrorism as part of an operation in a much wider-ranging Changewar, the precise aims and consequences of which are hidden from inhabitants of the present day.”
I once lived in Kyoto. It was a magical time of my life, wandering temples and wooden-shuttered backstreets, side-eyeing geisha at the bus stop – the town that had been Japan’s capital for a thousand years, simmering in the summer heat. My history tutor told me to ring the doorbell of a fearsome, fortress-like building, and to announce to the occupant that I was his deshi. This simple watchword unlocked the bolts, and an antique dealer, feared by the locals, welcomed me with open arms and showed me prints of the war with Russia from a hundred years before. “I remember your teacher when he was your age,” he said. “Like it was yesterday.” But it wasn’t yesterday; it had been twenty years. I went to a barber and sipped gingerly at tea that tasted of fish, while a man who seemed to think it was still 1951 asked me if I wanted a “G.I.” haircut.
Sometimes I forgot what year it was myself. I felt that was how the whole town got along. There was a children’s playground next to a mount called Mimizuka, the “Hill of Ears”. But the name was a lie; it was full of noses, hacked off Korean soldiers during the samurai invasion that closed the 16th century. Every day I would walk across the bridge at Gojo, where my hero Yoshitsune had legendarily fought the monk Benkei. I bought manga and rock CDs next to a little temple, where Oda Nobunaga had made his last stand. I ate noodles near the spot where Yasuke, the black samurai, had overwhelmed his traitorous enemies. Of course, I was going to be a historian, so that others could see what I could see.
In a tea-house, a girl all in grey with shining eyes told me that we had been married once before, in “a smoky room”. The next day, she shaved her head and became a Buddhist nun.
Nobody ever stole my pants from me in a dark alley, though.
The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog 