Jumalan tuomio turns upon a tawdry series of events, in which a local lawyer takes pity on a fallen woman – fallen through no fault of her own, but because her brother is a convict on the run. Helena (Ansa Ikonen) is packed off to Helsinki to study, where she falls for the judge’s son Aarne (Tauno Palo), who soon dumps his fiancée for her. But with opposition to their love, Helena considers marrying Mr Peltoniemi (Wilho Ilmari), her fallback beau.
Aarne, also a lawyer, undertakes to clear the name of Helena’s brother, but that’s not the only court case that unfolds around her, as Helena is accused of murdering the illegitimate baby to which she gives birth, alone, in a deserted barn.
In an incredibly complex denouement, testing one’s grasp of Finnish tenses to the limit, Helen confesses to drowning her child, although she is later found to have merely dropped it into the water and fainted from grief when a passer-by failed to help her rescue it. The case turns around the prospect that Helena wanted the child – evidence is presented of the baby clothes she was happily making – and to what extent any of this is anyone’s business but God’s, hence the title. But she is still wracked with guilt, and on a trip to the bridge where the child fell, she throws herself into the water and kills herself. The menfolk who have variously failed her, played her, bedded her and deserted her are left to wring their hands about how they could have played things better.
Although the above synopsis makes this film sound like a tense indoor drama, Toivo Särkkä and Yrjö Norta’s eleventh and last film as co-directors makes much of outdoor location work, with several Helsinki street scenes, and an expensive interlude in which Helena and Aarne go sailing. Although the dialogue is stagey and melodramatic, the effects work is impressive – not only is Helena’s bridge jump a believable and stomach-churning stunt, but the film ends with her body lying in state and a halo forming around her head. So I guess that’ll be God’s judgement.
The original 1937 stage play by Arvi Pohjanpää was set in the immediate aftermath of the Finnish Civil War. This movie adaptation deliberately stretches the time frame up to the 1930s, in order to give it a certain modern resonance.
Jonathan Clements is the author of An Armchair Traveller’s History of Finland.
“At 20,000 words or thereabouts, a BFI Film Classic is roughly the length of a feature-film commentary track, which means that in many cases, film-lovers have options to hear entire ‘audio books’ on DVDs, often by the people who made the films themselves. I, for one, have spent many happy hours as Chris McQuarrie laments the fate of his Way of the Gun in real time, or listening to James Schamus and Ang Lee relentlessly take the piss out of their own movie, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In other words, since only a few years after the inauguration of the Film Classics list, it has faced serious competition from the movies themselves, as the nature of DVD extras began to favour very similar, in-depth accounts of a movie’s construction.”
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