Good-hearted Anna (Lea Joutseno) cherishes the idea of a nursing career, even though everyone around her in her small Savo town recommends she does something sensible with her life (what’s wrong with being a nurse!?). Borrowing enough money to come to the Big City of Helsinki, her earnest devotion to her studies makes her an outcast among a bunch of privileged, party-going students. She reaches her early twenties and is jokingly inducted into the “old maid’s club”, fending off the lovelorn advances of a lovelorn physician, while still mooning helplessly around her childhood sweetheart Erkki (Tapio Nurkka), now a famous violinist.

A traditionally pointless set of misunderstandings lead both Erkki and Anna to pretend they are engaged to other people, until they aren’t, and then they get engaged to each other.

After the success of Safety Valve (1942), which was also based on a novel by Hilja Valtonen, screenwriter of the moment, Martti Larni, significantly compressed the meandering storylines of Valtonen’s novel A Teacher’s Wild-child (1928, Opettajan villiko), mercifully junking the first twenty years or so of what appears (to me at least) to be a dreary coming-of-age story. Paula Talaskivi at the Helsingin Sanomat thought he’d thrown the baby out with the bathwater, claiming that he’d “unjustifiably dwelt on the story’s most inconsequential and uncharacteristic phases, such as tedious and odd depictions of student life, while skimping on the opportunities to showcase the essence of Valtonen’s style at its most vibrant and best— opportunities that could have been found, for instance, in the events set in a Savo village.”

Eight decades on, the film’s high points can be seen in the tiniest of real-world details, such as the huge number of telegraph/power lines in multiple rows by the side of a train track, and a bunch of shots in and around the unchanging grandeur of Helsinki railway station. Several exteriors were shot on Haapaniemi street in Kuopio, affording the cast and crew a chance to get out of Helsinki, where food rationing made it far less of an attractive destination than the character of Anna claimed. Anitra Katro adds a degree of vim as the party-going bad-girl Elli, but Lea Joutseno and Tapio Nurkka in the lead roles here, just as they were in Safety Valve, are plainly just phoning it in.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films so you don’t have to.