1853/4: Regina Berg (Regina Linnanheimo) is an orphaned fisherman’s daughter who lives in Kaivopuisto, once nothing more than a pokey workman’s village, now the lynchpin of aristocratic Helsinki, a massive swathe of seaside parkland ringed by new villas and mansions. As a sometime delivery girl and flower seller, she is thrown into the lives of the nobles, specifically the entourage of the Russian princess Kristina Popoff (a welcome return from Ester Toivonen, absent from the screen since 1940’s Tenant Farmer’s Girl), who descends each summer on the “Finnish Riviera” to escape from St Petersburg. Regina is a hit with the serving girls at the manor, one of whom even shows her around the areas above-stairs.
In a twist knowingly redolent of Cinderella, Regina purloins some of Kristina’s clothes in order to sneak into a ball at her mansion, where she flirts with Kristina’s cousin Engelbert (Tauno Palo), a member of the Chevalier Guard, winning his affections and losing a golden shoe as she flees the venue. The mystery is swiftly solved after Kristina interrogates the servants, but Engelbert refuses to return the shoe unless its wearer comes to see him in person. He waits for three nights on the coast, and although Regina eventually arrives, she in turn refuses to accept any gifts from him unless he has honourable intentions.
After Engelbert tries to grab her, Regina returns home without her dress, leading her own family to suspect the worst and forbid her from any further dealings with the aristocrats. Engelbert’s lieutenant Ontrei (Unto Salminen), who helped Kristina escape from his clutches, takes the opportunity to confess his own feelings for her, and after spectacularly failing to read the room, offers to set her up as his own mistress in a Karelian love-nest.
On the eve of the Crimean War, Engelbert apologises for his crass behaviour and woos Regina for real, and the uncomplaining Ontrei drives them both to a nearby chapel, where Engelbert presents her with a wedding ring as a sign of his true love. He even suggests eloping to Stockholm, but Regina continues to refuse to do anything untoward. Engelbert heads off to war, and Kristina takes Regina under her wing, arranging for her to learn the manners and customs of the aristocracy. She even throws a Christmas ball to take Regina mind off her absent betrothed, and we see Regina dreaming wistfully of a dance with Engelbert…
…who turns out to have been killed in the Crimea, as remembered by an aged Kristina, now an old woman sitting by his graveside.
The story derived from the novel Kaivopuisto’s Beautiful Elsa (Kaivopuisto kaunis Elsa, 1936), written under the pseudonym of Tuulikki Kallio by Kaarina Kaarna, the wife of the artist, writer and sometime director Kalle Kaarna. Resolutely hanging onto her anonymity through a mail-drop in Tornio, Kaarna had offered the film to both Suomen Filmiteollisuus and its rival studio Suomi Filmi – Risto Orkko at the latter rejecting the deal on the grounds that filming an epic period drama in modern Helsinki would be prohibitively expensive.
No such qualms bothered Toivo Särkkä at Suomen Filmiteollisuus, who enthusiastically shot location work in the real-world Kaivopuisto, where even today a judiciously placed camera and a bit of concealing foliage can create a reasonable evocation of the 19th century. Actor Tauno Palo reported standing in Kaivopuisto, dressed in the uniform of one of the Tsar’s elite Chevalier Guards, only to find himself face-to-face with Gustaf Mannerheim, commander in chief of the Finnish armed forces. Mannerheim had himself been a Chevalier Guard in his youth, and regarded Palo quizzically, as if encountering a ghost from the past. Perhaps he had noticed that Palo’s costume neglected the historically accurate chamois leather pants of a Guard, which famously were so tight that they had be dragged on wet.
Filmed in the dying days of the summer of 1940, the story was renamed to reflect the big-name casting of Linnanheimo as the star – a rebranding so powerful as to lead to later editions of the book to be similarly altered. This blog has often asserted its disbelief that Linnanheimo was a star at all – to modern eyes, she often comes across as out-of-place as her contemporary Gracie Fields – but in the dour 1940s, ironically, she had finally learned how to smile.
Writer-director Toivo Särkkä was responsible for the shock ending, which deliberately disrupted the happy betrothal that closed the original with a bitter twist that only endeared the film even more to audiences reeling from the Winter War. The film is also fascinating for its treatment of sexual assault – not unlike the fierce Russian brute in The Great Wrath (1939), Engelbert assumes that Regina is his for the taking, that his interest in her is enough to justify her acquiescence. It’s something of a shock when he starts grabbing at her, and the camera lingers deliberately on her distress and denial, until her clothes come off and she (actually her body double) flees naked up the stairs. True to its setting, the film remains non-judgmental of Engelbert’s double standards, celebrating his ability to finally remember his manners, rather than damning him for not having any in the first place. Possibly, there is a nuance I haven’t noticed – that Engelbert has been somehow corrupted by Russian ways in St Petersburg, and needs to be reminded by a Finn of how a lady should be treated?
The film was the second-biggest box office hit of the year (beaten only by The Vagabond’s Waltz), the first Finnish movie to be exhibited at the Venice Film Festival, and exported to several other countries. Paula Talaskivi, in the Helsingin Sanomat, articulated what everybody else was thinking, that the number-one film had been so entertaining that its thematic follow-up could only be a disappointment, and that despite the largesse lavished on grand set pieces, the realistically verbose 1850s dialogue was wearing after a while. Toini Aaltonen in Suomen Sosialidemokraati agreed, noting that while it was okay on the surface, it was “half-hearted and naïve” in its inner soul. “But the saddest thing,” he wrote, “is the infinite, unrelenting cuteness of this movie story, which towards the end begins to be downright boring. After watching it, you definitely have the desire to bite on something salty.”
The critics have a point, but the ending stabs like a knife as it segues from the opulent dance sequence into the lone sight of Regina in the graveyard – the picture I share here is taken from an angle to the side of the filming, not the one which had Engelbert’s name added to the front of the tomb. It prefigures a similar juxtaposition of abundance and loss at the end of Alexander Sokurov’s The Russian Ark (2002), an entire world destroyed in the first half of the twentieth century, and surely all too real and raw for many in the 1941 audience. Sure, the film is twee and the story is ludicrous, but Särkkä’s final sequence hammers home the way in which war is the death of romance.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films, so you don’t have to.
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