It is Christmas 1984, and struggling single mother Niina (Oona Airola) accidentally smashes her new Christmas tree through the window of the local newspaper in Inari, Lapland. Pleading for mercy from the gruff editor Esko (Hannu-Pekka Björkman, unrecognisable beneath an extinction-level mullet wig), she tries to pay off her debt by working for free as a cub reporter. This harder than it sounds because much of Niina’s previously published work was poems about ponies in the school magazine, and Esko’s proudest scoop in the previous year was about a sock that someone lost through a hole in the ice in a fishing competition.
But try Niina does, in the midst of preparations for her sister’s entertainingly ghastly wedding, and an onslaught of guests at the remote Lapland hotel where her mother works. They are in town to investigate a mysterious “UFO” over the Christmas season, which foreign media is speculating was an off-course Russian missile.
Yes, it’s ridiculous. It’s also largely true, as this film from writer-director Miia Tervo draws its inspiration from the true story of the 1984 Lake Inari Incident. Like Atomic Blonde with shell-suits, it exults in the recreation of popular culture from 40 years ago, evoking far too many Finnish family photo albums for comfort – all dun-coloured Datsuns, transistor radios and grim buffets.
Niina’s dogged quest for the truth brings her into encounters with the military men at the hotel, including Kai (Pyry Kähkonen), the handsome, grieving pilot whose inability to see the intruder at high altitude might be one of the clues that it was a low-flying cruise missile. In a flurry of comic touches like something out of an Antti Tuomainen novel, the locals go crazy with Missile Trout (served with sparklers) and phallic Missile Doughnuts on sale. Esko would rather that Niina write about these delights, but she is determined to understand the geopolitical implications of a foreign city-busting weapon crashing near her sleepy hometown, and the implications if it happens to have scattered nuclear waste all over the landscape.
It’s here that the gentle humour of The Missile takes a turn for the dark, as Tommi Korpela growls at doubters that “nuclear power is perfectly safe” (eighteen months before Chernobyl), and the soundtrack ramps up with a bunch of melancholy disco floor fillers redolent of the era’s atomic paranoia.
As with Family Time, another recent Finnish film that Finnair has also seen fit to offer on its intercontinental flights this season, there is also a fine opportunity for learning some new Finnish terms and phrases, including “rubber arse cushion”. “Is the Russian arse so sweet that we have to lick it?” comments one old man, leaving Niina to haphazardly translate it for a baffled visiting Welshman.
Reviews in Finland were almost universally positive and glowing, apart from a lone dissenter, Jussi Virratvuori in the Karjalainen, who flayed it for “not knowing if it was comedy or tragedy.” But Tervo never promised us either – the film begins without credits or explanation, and if later events begin to hove close to the reason why Niina is a “single mother”, with the release from prison of her estranged husband, it’s not like it isn’t telegraphed in the opening scenes.
The presence of a few Estonian names among the cast and crew reveal this film’s origins as an elaborate Baltic Europudding of finances, deftly steered by its producers to land as a gentle evocation of life forty years ago, dripping like The Activists with pointed comments about the degree to which some things never change, with regard to certain neighbours across the border.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films so that you don’t have to.The Missile is currently streaming on Netflix.
“Jonathan Clements, author of Anime: A History, cautioned that over-production of films could unpleasantly shock studios and investors. ‘Animation consumers are themselves a resource that needs to be carefully managed,’ he said.”
Over at CNBC, I’m one of Evelyn Cheng’s interviewees as she ponders the success of Ne Zha 2, officially the biggest selling animated film in history, although most of those sales are in a single territory, its Chinese homeland. She came to me because of the chapter on the relationship between anime and China in my book, which predicted the shedding of Japanese links as China pursued cultural and industrial autarky in the animation sector.
Ne Zha 2 marks the culmination of the 2020 “Five Year Plan for the Film Industry”, which proclaimed a demand for a “strong film nation” (dianying qiangguo), all the better to aid “digitial ingestion, cloudification and intelligent upgrading of the entire film industry chain.” This doesn’t just mean the movies themselves, but the vertically integrated media mix (as the Japanese call it), of merchandise, spinoffery and cultural tourism. For a long time, in this regard, as I said in 2017, China was “rediscovering the wheel while ignoring the cart.” When your film is entirely made in-country, is about a Chinese subject, features Chinese locations and Chinese products, that entire chain is folded in domestically. It helps if your market is so heavily protected that foreign films don’t get much of a look-in.
Although there’s a lot of vainglorious talk of Ne Zha taking the world by storm, so far this is the very antithesis of the former bold plans for globalisation of Chinese film. Someone has worked out that you don’t need a hallowed world-beating franchise; in a market as big as China, you just need to find your local audience. Cheng’s article contains some interesting comments in the ongoing argument about film culture, including a production house in Beijing that ignores the vast size of China’s domestic potential market, and instead targets specific audiences of a mere 30 million people…. so…. trying to appeal to a footprint roughly the size of Saudi Arabia or Peru or Australia, not the whole massiveness of Chinese society.
After the surprise news that I had inadvertently contributed to a three-part podcast about Chairman Mao last year, I also show up in Noiser’s Real Dictators series talking about General Tojo.
I vaguely remember that when I was recording the Mao interview on camera ten years ago, in a whirlwind day in which I was only above ground in London for 90 minutes or so before I was on the Tube back to the airport, the director asked me for a soundbite about Tojo. I said something vaguely related to Japan at War in the Pacific and thought no more of it. Presumably, I then showed up in a docuemntary I have never seen, and a decade later, the audio was repurposed for a podcast I didn’t know about.
When signing contracts for TV interviews, one does tend to agree that the company can do whatever they want with the material, and I think it’s quite nice that the work can be repurposed so long after the fact. It wouldn’t have killed them to let me know, though.
“Do not open your mouth,” hisses Clarissa the fixer at the director, whose Teochew-accented Chinese sometimes risks getting us into trouble. “The man we are going to meet is Mr Lŭ, third tone.”
“Mr Lú,” says the director.
“That’s second tone,” says Clarissa. “You just said ‘Mr Donkey’. Just call him Professor, for Christ’s sake.”
We are interviewing Mr Lu at Shizhaishan, a desolate hillside in Yunnan that once would have had a commanding view of Lake Dian below. These days, it’s blocked by high-rise buildings, and the hillside is walled off by an imposing fence, because it is one of the most important sites in Dian history.
In 1954, archaeologists at Shizhaishan uncovered dozens of graves of the Dian nobility, including one containing a golden seal that bore the Chinese words: KING OF DIAN. A similar seal, denoting the KING OF NA, turned up long ago in Japan, where locals claimed that it had been conferred upon a barbarian kingdom by the Han Emperor Wudi. Nobody took this seriously until the Shizhaishan find, when it became apparent that Wudi had indeed had uncharacteristic gold seals made for the kings of borderland regions that had recognised his authority.
The King of Dian’s seal is in the national museum in Beijing – it officially marks the moment when Yunnan became part of China. The locals in Yunnan have to make do with a replica; just one of several political issues that clearly still needle Mr Donkey.
It is a difficult interview. Our arrival is bodged, because it takes us half an hour longer than planned to negotiate the tight, winding rural roads, and Mr Lu has been waiting by a dunghill with a nameless woman from the Propaganda bureau whom we soon dub the Jawa. Her facial features are entirely covered by a hoodie, mirrored sunglasses and a full-face breathing mask, which is oddly sinister, and turns out to be because she has a streaming cold, and keeps coughing during the interview and ruining the takes.
When we arrive, the director isn’t sure who this odd couple are, and entirely ignores them, and we only identify Mr Lu when I walk up and introduce myself. But that’s only the beginning of our problems, because he is everybody’s second choice. The archaeologist who actually led the 1954 dig, and a subsequent find in 1999, has refused to talk to the media, because of a bad experience with an earlier crew, and Mr Lu is reluctant to discuss several important issues.
Interviewees have to be managed, anyway. It’s part of my job to come in at the start, speak Chinese like a performing dog, and make it clear that I am not some clueless puppet, but someone who has read the Grand Scribe’s Records, knows my Han dynasty from my Tang dynasty, and is here to make the interviewee heard and understood. As regular readers of this parish will already know, it can be discombobulating to have an English-speaking film crew unload a literal tonne of gear in a remote village, and start pushing them around, hectoring them to stand on various unsteady hillocks, and badgering them to repeat themselves, answer leading questions, and film things out of order. I am quite used to having the director yelling at me to take three paces forward and stare into the sun, but the people I have to put at their ease are often facing a camera for the first time.
The Jawa doesn’t help by lurking at the sidelines with a camera of her own, documenting our visit for official reports and local media. When the director jokingly suggests that somebody cooks a nearby yappy dog to shut it up, Clarissa rails at the crew to stop laughing, “because someone from Propaganda is pointing a camera at us, and I don’t want them to think we are not taking this seriously!”
“So,” I say, “are there still artefacts buried here?”
“I don’t want to answer that question,” he says, reddening, because the last thing he wants is literal gold-diggers breaking in with shovels. He knows we don’t have time to explain that an “artefact” is just as likely to be a midden or a cow bone as “treasure”, and that’s all some viewers will hear. Nor does he really want to talk about the progress of the site, because funding is not forthcoming. The site has fallen into disrepair, the duckboards around the edge are rotting, and the “guard house” is staffed by a gurning old lady and the aforementioned yappy dog.
Media people refer to “sit-up-and-beg questions” – simple, rather vague queries designed to give the interviewee the chance to say whatever they feel like. But Mr Lu is deeply cagey about his site, and reluctant to describe “his” discoveries in the first person because he is a stand-in for the real boss. I try to get him to talk about simple issues, like backfilling the soil (in Chinese hui tian, literally “returning the field”), but this is a touchy subject for him, because they only backfilled the site because their funding has ended, on what appear to be five stops and starts, including the 1950s dig curtailed by the Great Leap Forward, and the 1990s dig funded by a relics bureau that lost interest once they’d airlifted the gold seal to the capital. I have mentioned before the intricate politics of the Terracotta Army site, where the archaeologists are deliberately taking years to poke around the edges, because if they dig out the central mound and don’t find buried treasure, their gravy-train funding will be over. Shizhaishan seems to prove my point for me.
Eventually, he relaxes. I assure him that “I don’t want to answer that question” is a valid response, and that we will just ask him something else, but we do run into a large number of dead ends with him, and it’s difficult to get anything out of him. We eventually get enough to fill a segment, and by the end he is starting to enjoy himself.
As so often happens, we film our “first meeting” last of all, by which time he is all smiles, and he doesn’t blink at the fact that we do it in reverse order. On the final cut, he will greet me at the Buick, lead me up the hill and through the gate, and down into the pits of the dig site, while the drone soars up above over our heads. But on location, where we are moving the gear back down the hill to the van in stages, we first film us walking into the pit, then walking through the gate into the site, then up the hill to the gate, then meeting each other at the car, and then the drone shot.
The crew’s behaviour can look weird to an outsider. Just because we correctly walk up a hill, it doesn’t mean that a farmer hasn’t wandered into shot behind us, or the sun has gone behind a cloud and ruined the continuity for the lighting, or the cameraman has forgotten to run the film. We take our positions for a third take, and the director nods to begin.
“You can start walking,” I hiss to him out of the corner of my mouth.
“But the director hasn’t said ‘Action’,” he points out.
While we get our drone footage, Mr Lu smokes fag after fag by the cars, and jokes with the crew. Our driver starts chatting up the Jawa, whose mask turns out to hide an attractive and friendly young girl ready to discuss the pitfalls of local television, and not the terrifying figure we had assumed her to be.
Our backwards shooting schedule continues as the sun climbs. I am dragged off to film an even earlier shot, of me driving through the village to meet him in the first place, and by the time I come back, he and the Jawa have gone. I got the impression with him, as I do with many interviewees, that by the time he came round to appreciating that he was going to be on telly showing off about his life’s work, it was all over.
Spooling through the footage six years later for this article, I realise that Mr Lu didn’t even get his fifteen minutes of fame. There was so little material we could work with that he’s there and gone in thirty seconds, just long enough to point across some waste ground at the place where they found the gold seal.
The afternoon is spent filming the modern legacy of the Dian kingdom. Remember that we knew almost nothing about it until the 20th century. But the archaeological evidence uncovered in the last 60 years has allowed us to discover their clothing, their architecture and their bronzes, enough to supply suitable material for an entire Dian Kingdom theme park by the side of the lake, complete with houseboats, statuary, and a Ferris wheel. I yell a piece to camera in the wind by the lakeside, surrounded by screaming seagulls, and observe that the Dian warriors of old would be aghast at such a use of their culture, particularly since the theme park seemingly lacks a Human Sacrifice Experience.
Somewhat to my surprise, I show up on the Noiser Real Dictators series talking about Chairman Mao, across three podcasts, here, here and here. My appearance is actually repurposed audio from a TV interview I did ten years ago — contractually, World Media Rights can do whatever they want with the material, and some bright spark there has realised that the world is better served by being unable to see my face.
It was a bit of shock when someone on Facebook told me they enjoyed my “Mao thing”, because it took several minutes to work out how I could have recorded three podcasts without realising it. As long as it keeps shifting copies of A Brief History of China for me, I suppose I don’t mind!
I have developed a new-found respect for Michael Wood, who I have always liked, but whose Story of China I have been looking at again recently. His episodes on the early dynasties found him visiting not only the same places as us, but interviewing some of the same people in Luoyang and Anyang, but what’s striking is how hard he tries to get the grass-roots opinions of the common folk. Always one for social history, Wood happily hangs out with a bunch of farmers’ wives, and asks them what they think of the discoveries at Erlitou or the Wastes of Yin. History has long been divided between the approaches of the high-brow Thucydides, who wants everything cross-checked and assessed, and the low-brow Herodotus, who doesn’t mind repeating gossip as it is a fair reflection of what people believed to be true. Herodotus is often more fun.
It is cold and damp today. Raining. Almost impossible to film anything, and we can’t get indoors at the museum until tomorrow. And so the director half-heartedly rules that we will try to get some footage at the Jiming-si (Temple of the Crowing Rooster), one of the oldest temples in Nanjing, founded in the Middle Ages, destroyed before the Ming dynasty, destroyed in the Taiping Rebellion, and rebuilt once more. It is the location of the Rouge Well, so named because concubines of the Southern Tang emperor hid from rebels during the fall of that short-lived dynasty, and left traces of their make-up smeared on the sides.
Unlike many other temples, a trio of incense sticks is part of the admission fee, leading to baffled crowds of Communist-era Chinese, bumping into each other and squinting at the instructions posted on the wall that tell them how to pray. I light my sticks at the votive candles, blow them out so they start to smoke, and then bow to the four directions before placing them in the censer. That’s more than we can say for The Human Torch, a woman in a mustard yellow puffa jacket who lights her large incense sticks, doesn’t blow them out, and then wanders aimlessly around the courtyard like a roving fire hazard, flames rising a foot into the air.
The director tries to film at the city wall and at the nearby “old” town, which, as ever, is chock full of snack stalls and little else, but the rain is pretty miserable. I spend less than five minutes on camera today, and even that is just walking from point to point through crowds. So an easy day to me, although we will have to make up for it later in the week.
The people in room 1806 are having very athletic sex. Clarissa the fixer and I, whose rooms are on either side, are scoring them on WeChat for volume and achievement.
The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog 