“Made with the cooperation of the Finnish tourist board, the film is literally swimming with careful moments of product placement and what the Japanese call ‘holy land’ locations inviting a real-life visit, such as the Yrjönkatu Swimming Baths, the first and oldest public swimming pool in Helsinki, built in 1928. At the time they were filming Yoko’s solo dips, the pool had only recently allowed swimmers to wear clothes at all – until 2001, it had been nudist by decree.
“On the subject of clothes, Masako loses her luggage on arrival in Helsinki, and is obliged to dress with whatever she finds in the Helsinki shops until it is recovered. Surprise, surprise, all she seems to be able to rustle up are eye-stingingly expensive clothes from Marimekko, the world-famous Finnish brand. But the company has a strong connection to Japan, unknown even to many Finns, since one of its leading textile designers, designing 400 fabric prints from 1974 to 2006, was a Japanese man, Fujiwo Ishimoto. Today, he is back in his native Japan, where his own fashion brand, Mustakivi, derives its name from the Finnish for ‘black rock’.”
In a rare conjunction of my interests, I am asked to provide a video essay for the forthcoming limited edition Australian release of Naoko Ogigami’s Kamome Shokudo (2006), a film about a Japanese woman who opens a cafe in Helsinki.
It’s Midsummer Eve, and the youth of a Finnish village have gathered for a big party. Eetu Mikkola (Aku Käykö), heir to the wealthiest estate in the region, asks the pretty Leena Kosken (Helena Koskinen) to dance, to which she agrees with great reluctance. Seeing that Eetu’s advances are growing increasingly unwelcome, logger Erkki (Urho Somersalmi) diplomatically calls for a dance in the round. Eetu bristles with irritation at the interference of the logger gang, and starts trying to whip up the local folk against them over the course of several evenings.
Eventually Erkki bodily lifts Eetu off the ground and hangs him from a bridge support, and when that fails to shut him up, he throws him in the river. The stand-off continues, between gangs of rich boys and blue-collar folk, while Erkki and his fellow loggers gather beneath Leena’s window to sing a serenade.
Called away to see his sick mother, Erkki asks Leena to wait for him, and gives her a ring made of birch bark. While he is away, the mansion where Leena lives is put up for sale, becoming the subject of a fierce bidding war between Eetu and a wealthy investor, who turns out to be Erkki’s father. Erkki the presumed penniless logger rolls back into town in an open top car for the traditional Finnish homily that money doesn’t matter, but it really helps, and the young couple race off to the altar.
The origins of this Finnish film blog lay in the release of a DVD box set of all the films of the Suomen Filmiteollisuus company a few years ago. What this means, is that although it aims to be complete, I have yet to go back before that company’s foundation in 1934 to watch the decade of movies that came before it. This Midsummer’s Eve, I caught Tukkipojan morsian on television, and decided to throw it in out of order.
Billed as the tenth anniversary production for the studio Suomi-Filmi, and Finland’s “first 100% talkie”, The Woodcutter’s Bride is a fascinating study in film technology. A few scenes are indeed recorded in studios with microphones, but much of the film is shot wild outdoors, overdubbed with sleight of hand, as characters retreat into the distance or turn their backs to avoid lip sync issues, narrate scenes in post-production, or take a back seat for long, space-filling song and dance numbers.
Large chunks of the drama are portrayed in mime, which writer-director Erkki Karu cunningly renders part of the story, by setting so much of the action at raucous barn dances, where nobody can make themselves heard.
Writing for the Helsingin Sanomat, reviewer Erkki Kivijärvi totally got it, praising the film for its depiction of “summer idylls, Midsummer bonfires, girls in national costume carrying milk churns, bridge dances, fights… rafting and other picturesque phenomena of our rural life – both everyday and sacred.”
The anonymous reviewer in Svenska Pressen gushed about the film’s “novelties in the choice of characters, camera settings and editing,” which only serves to remind us that even hoary old clichés were young once. Here, we see the roots of uncountable later productions like Rich Girl (1939) and Scorned (1939) – the good-hearted salt of the earth, the girl pressured into an unwanted marriage, the Finnish stand-off between good-hearted boys who work with their hands, and an entitled class of monied dastards. Since the title also constitutes a synopsis, the conniving Eetu is little more than a plot device, but theatre actor Aku Käykö brings a bewitching presence to the screen. For some reason, his eyes glint and flash in the camera, giving him a feline, replicant aura that I have failed to catch in my screengrabs.
In the role of the young male lead, the forty-something Urho Somersalmi is pushing his luck. He was destined to be superseded by a new generation of male leads in the next few years, and indeed, we are witnessing them, in turn, aging out of the spotlight in the 1940s in the main strand of this Finnish film watchathon. Then again, this would not be the last Finnish film to feature middle-aged men duelling over the affections of a barely-legal girl. See, for example, The Bachelor Patron (1938).
Love interest Helena Koskinen is bright and feisty, holding her own for as long as she can against Eetu’s effortlessly wielded privilege. Her film career fizzled out in the wake of The 45,000 (1933), an earnest film about the spread of tuberculosis, but not because of any lack of talent. She was one of the casualties of director Karu’s cataclysmic falling-out with the board of his own company, after which he stomped off to start a new studio, Suomen Filmiteollissus. Which is where we came in, with Our Boys in the Air (1934).
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films, so you don’t have to.
Star-crossed lovers Aliina (the ever-radiant Irma Seikkula) and Jalmari (Olavi Reimas) are separated by Aliina’s stern father Mr Jarvela (Väinö Sola), who thinks that his daughter can do better than a miller’s son. Sure enough, Aliina soon gains a new suitor in the form of the elderly widower Elias (Edvin Laine), a man from the next village who has pots of cash.
Realising that she is pregnant, Aliina gives in to Elias’s entreaties. Working at a distant saw mill, Jalmari hears that Aliina has got married and had a son, and returns, despondent to his home district, where he gets a job at Elias’s mill. There, he must fight off the predatory minx Kerttu (the relentlessly sassy Kirsi Hurme, in highly unconvincing braids), as well as the flirty Maija-Liisa (Tuire Orri), who is only chasing him to make her boyfriend jealous.
But it’s Aliina who he truly loves, and he begins seeing her again in secret. The jilted Kerttu tells her boyfriend to reveal the affair to Elias, to get Jalmari fired and take his job. A broken-hearted, vengeful Elias finds the lovers inside the mill’s wheelhouse, and locks them in, hoping to drown them when he opens the sluice gate. But his scheme is thwarted when Kerttu realises the consequences of her actions and organises a rescue.
Elias banishes his wayward wife, granting her only wish – a little cottage with Jalmari and their child. His sister Etla (Anni Aitto) offers words of comfort that are an inversion of the ending of The Women of Niskavuori (1938), telling him: “The young are young, the old must give way. The law of life is merciless. The harvest will increase. Then even the quiet hum of the old mill will continue.”
You would think that the Finns would have had enough of the rural-woman-with-illegitimate-child-reunited-with-true-love cliché, but this adaptation of Lauri Haarla’s 1942 stage play Keinu-morsian adds another one to the pile, despite its similarity to his earlier Scorned (1939) and God’s Storm (1940). Martti Larni’s script expands the original with a few action-packed exteriors of farm life and a funfair, but Suomen Filmiteollisuus hedged its bets by premiering the film in rural cinemas, ahead of its “first” night in That Fancy Helsinki.
Haarla finished the original script “while air-raid sirens were wailing in Helsinki”, and some of the press at the time noticed the palliative effect of a pastoral drama when audiences had other problems they wanted to forget. Despite panning the film as a waste of time, Paula Talaskivi in the Helsingin Sanomat noted: “Eino Heino’s camera has captured within its frame the rural views that constantly captivate my eyes and the brightness of summer nature.”
Eight decades on, the camerawork remains the most striking thing about it, including an opening shot in which the happy lovers on a swing remain static while the entire world spins around them. The forest scenes, too, are shot in natural Finnish light, with the skies ablaze but the foregrounds often shrouded in shadow because of the low sun. Lakes are shot with painterly indulgence, and dockside scenes bustle with documentary urgency. Then and now, Valentin Vaala’s film plays like a keepsake of a past that had already gone, and yet which looms so largely in the family backgrounds of many Finns, for whom the lakes and forests of their ancestry are never all that far away.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films so you don’t have to.
In 1939, Helsinki port authorities refuse to allow 29 Jewish refugees to disembark on the grounds they do not have jobs or places to stay. Prominent Helsinki businessman Abraham Stiller (Ville Virtanen) says that if that is the only problem, he will vouch for them all. His rash promise ruffles feathers among the understandably jumpy congregation at the Helsinki synagogue, but he remains true to his word.
Stiller is a confident, proud Finnish Jew, berating the uppity official Arno Anthoni (a chilling Kari Hietalahti) who objects to Jews outside the store, unaware that his suit has just been tailored for him by Janka, one of Stiller’s refugees. But as the Soviet Union orchestrates a reopening of hostilities on the frontier, and Finland contemplates a “co-belligerency pact” with the Nazis, Stiller finds his power begin to erode.
At first it is little things – objections to English-language newspapers; schoolboys shouting “Heil Hitler” – but as the years pass, the accommodation of the Nazis leads to a hardening of attitudes towards the Jews. In a cunning ruse, the film’s feel-good title does not derive from some TV-movie-level message of hope, but from the slogan on a propaganda poster celebrating Finland’s military team-up with the Third Reich.
Like Oskar Schindler, with whom he would inevitably be compared, Abraham Stiller is a complicated figure, a holy fool unjustifiably confident in his ability to fix things. His promise on the dockside secures the safety of 29 people, but his similarly brash assurance that his charges shouldn’t flee for Sweden as the noose tightens ultimately costs several of them their lives.
A snarling Nazi officer demands to know what he is doing in Lapland, and he cheekily answers: “I’m on Finnish territory. I could ask you the same thing.” Despite a Luger only recently pointed at his head, he insists on wading back across the marsh to his friends in a work gang, in order to finish their celebration of the Sabbath.
Stiller’s over-confidence comes back to bite him, when it is revealed that the Nazis’ wish-list of Jews derives from the congregational lists that he himself gave to the authorities in order to guarantee the sanctuary of the original group of refugees. As Anthoni gloats over the news, he quotes Casablanca (1942). This is something that Stiller will regret: “…maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon.” It’s Anthoni who comes up with a work-around to placate the Nazis without annoying the Finnish authorities – instead of deporting Finnish citizens, they will start with refugees with foreign passports.
The opening titles of Klaus Härö’s Ei koskaan yksin are a procession of production partners of almost comedic length, revealing a large-scale Europudding – a Finnish story, bolstered with German and Scandinavian financing, backed by the Austrians, and partly shot in Estonia. The crew makes the most of what was plainly a very restricted shoot on Helsinki’s Bulevardi, a street that has frankly remained unchanged for the last century, and which can easily be repurposed for the 1940s – if I remember rightly, it was also the location of Aatami Korppi’s bank in the closing scene of Sisu (2022). Unfortunately, this means that the passage of four or five years of historical time is lensed on what appears to be the same drab October day, but Härö makes the best of this look, shooting his film as if it takes place in a world where it is forever autumn.
A black and white framing device, reversing the use of colour in Schindler’s List, reminds us that 1972, when the dying Stiller is interviewed about his life, is actually further away from our own time than it was from the time of the Holocaust. It also hides the aged Stiller from the harsher glare of full lighting, allowing actor Virtanen to get away with his old-man make-up.
The film is a glorious mash-up of contending languages, not only Finnish and German, but haunted throughout by sudden outbreaks of Yiddish, whenever the Jews are in their own company. I have always been charmed and unsettled by the sound of Yiddish, ever since I first heard it in a cold open for The West Wing – like German from another universe. It is a topic most brilliantly pursued in one of my favourite books, Aaron Lansky’s Outwitting History, about how this language could go from being one of the most widely spoken in the world, to a forgotten orphan, over-written not only by the Holocaust, but also by the migration of so many of its surviving speakers to the United States, where their children grew up speaking English, or Israel, where their children grew up speaking Hebrew.
Drawing on the work of the real-life author Elina Sana, the film grapples with the fact that free Finland, which was, unlike Norway and Denmark, not actually occupied with the Nazis, nevertheless was prepared to send seven people to their deaths in Auschwitz, one of them a Helsinki-born child.
Its closing reel, and the catch-up titles that end the film, struggle with this scandal, seemingly unable to reconcile the matter of the film itself with the facts of history. These seven, we are told, were the only Jews that Finland gave up, and it was thanks to Stiller and the Helsinki synagogue that no more were sent to their deaths. But we see nothing of this later struggle, nor of the fate of the dastardly Anthoni, who fled for Sweden at the end of the war, but was repatriated to face trial, released with little more than a slap on the wrist, and died conveniently before Elina Sana’s late twentieth-century investigations began poking at the true story behind it all. The book Finland’s Holocaust is the best account of it all in English, and has much on Anthoni’s lick-spittling trip to Berlin to appease the Nazis, played for dark humour in the film, in which his enthusiastic “Heil Hitler!” to Heinrich Müller is greeted with an icy stare, as the Nazi officer insists on finishing the piano sonata he is playing before answering.
Instead the film ends with a trip to Israel, where the sole survivor is cajoled into making a token gesture of forgiveness to Stiller. It is an unfortunate mis-step, attempting to tie everything up with a bow, and seemingly contradicted by the film’s closing title card, which reveals that after seeing his wife and son die in Auschwitz, Georg Kollman “never spoke of Finland.”
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films so you don’t have to. Never Alone is currently one of the in-flight movie options on Finnair.
In an unexpected spin-off from my lecture last week about Mannerheim’s adventures in the Far East, I have obtained a copy of the Chinese edition of his epic Across Asia, published in 2004. “Sino-Finnish friendship,” proclaims a poetic belly-band bearing the logo of the Metso paper company, “is long-standing and well-established.”
Translator Wang Jiaji fulminates in his afterword about the pitfalls of trying to work out which godforsaken village Mannerheim might have been writing about in 1907, after 12 hours in the saddle and a rainstorm, when he got the name from an illiterate Kirghiz tribesman who couldn’t speak Chinese, seemingly unaware that even as the presses were rolling on this edition, Harry Halén was publishing his Analytical Index to Across Asia in faraway Helsinki. It’s this frightfully obscure work, for which I suspect I was the sole customer, that made it possible for me to get the names right in my own book.
“The purpose of this trip was military in nature,” says Ulla-Maja Kulonen carefully in her preface, “but it also carried other investigation tasks.” Well, yes, that’s one way of putting it, I suppose. Mannerheim was sent into Central Asia to map terrain, probe military readiness, and investigate the penetration of Japanese influence, assembling the data for a 1909 military report, which handed Russian top brass a game-plan for invading Xinjiang, and a terse assessment of the lack of a threat that China presented.
To do so, he travelled undercover for two years, posing as a Swedish ethnologist, and performatively shipping back artefacts and observations by the crateful during his long mission. It is a testament to Mannerheim’s enthusiastic embrace of his cover story that his findings would become the subject of several academic papers, this brick-sized diary of his journey, a large chunk of the Central Asian holdings in Helsinki museums, and 1200+ priceless photographs of life in China at the turn of the 20th century.
His diary was published by in Chinese the China Nationality Art Photograph Publishing House, suggesting that a century later, it was his observations of local ethnic communities that turned into an unexpected bonus. An anonymous editor provides a frowning afterword in which he is a lot pushier about the whole spy thing.
“We must… recognise that as an explorer from a Western power 100 years ago, the author’s activities in our country’s west served the dual purpose of military espionage and scientific exploration,” say The Editors ominously. “This is a concrete manifestation of the colonial policy of the Tsarist government and the history of imperialist aggression against China.” Such commentary is not that unusual – the Mandarin translator of my own Short History of the Silk Road spattered the published edition with quibbling footnotes, although he stopped short of calling me an imperialist aggressor.
Wang Jiaji, himself the author of a Chinese book on Mannerheim, adds that the publication of the book in Chinese was the culmination of a massive effort by multiple Finnish organisations – including a translation subsidy from the Finnish Literature Information Centre, and big-name sponsors including a bunch of paper companies (Metso, UPM-Kymmene, Finnish Forestry Industries Federation), Nokia and Finnair. Although Across Asia was completed in 1908, it lay unpublished for three decades, which left it in an odd legal position regarding copyright – the Finno-Ugric Society waived all fees in order to get the Chinese edition off the ground.
Somehow, I find myself in Jyväskylä today, giving a lecture at the university that is being live-streamed to 20 or 30 other locations around Finland. I will be talking about a subject dear to my heart: the Asian adventures of Finland’s former president Mannerheim.
I offered the organisers a series on “Finns in the Far East”, and they said that the first one should probably be on this subject, as nothing gets the Finns out of bed on a Wednesday faster than the chance to hear more about the M-word.
Lieutenant Romppiainen and his ever-present sidekick, Sergeant Ryhmy, are tasked with blowing up a Russian ammo dump, but are captured when a shell hits their dugout. Thrown into jail, where they run rings around their captors, they team up with their cellmates (a former prisoner and former jailer) to break out. As they sneak out of trouble, they accidentally rescue Peikko (Kullervo Kalske) and Eila Kaija Rahola), two Finns being interrogated by Natalia Vengrovska (Kirsti Hurme), the tough but vampy Russian commissar.
They run into members of the Kuusinen Finnish People’s Army, a division of ethnic Finns that in the real world, performed a lot of the occupation duties in captured Karelia. Stealing their uniforms and posing as Red sympathisers, they blag their way out, and set the charges for the ammo dump. Ryhmy, his pointless cat, and the ever-smouldering Vengrovska are trapped inside, but make it out seconds ahead of the explosion. Abandoning the unconscious Vengrovska in the forest, Ryhmy makes it back to Finnish headquarters, where they receive little thanks for their heroism, and are instead put to work making an inventory of everything they have lost.
“Even farce has its limits,” commented Salama Simonen in Uusi Suomi. This second movie adaptation of Armas J. Pullas’ novel series after Ryhmy and Romppainen (1941) was intended as a comic diversion, but crashed straight into a recurring issue with wartime movies – whether to make light of the enemy or take them seriously. Finnish authorities were not amused by the depiction of Russians as merry fools, and Finnish officers as bumptious moustaches. Seven decades later, the most shocking thing is the sight of Finnish collaborators working for the Russians – a realistic reflection of history, but not the sort of alternative image one expects from propaganda. Despite this, Jees ja juust was regarded as so problematic, and so riddled with slurs against the Russians, that it was pulled from cinemas in the summer of 1944 and not seen again until its video release in 1988. Compare such redactions to the similar fate of That’s How it is, Boys (1942), another wartime hit that was quietly cancelled in a changing political climate.
The film’s characters form a familiar line-up in forties film. The leads are rude mechanicals, salts-of-the-earth, who in peacetime were a vacuum-cleaner salesman and a bus driver – a skillset that is presumably intended to make them readily identifiable to audiences. The drippy romantic B-plot between Peikko and Eila is tacked on to fill some sort of snogging quota. But the stand-out star is Kirsti Hurme, who obligingly plays Commissar Vengrovska not as a snarling enemy, but as a frustrated vamp in need of a good cuddle, all torture and interrogation scenes presented more as some sort of dress-up bondage game. This, presumably, is why she became such a hit with army audiences, the most-requested star for public appearances on military bases.
Ryhmy and Romppainen would return in one further film, “Give Us the Olympics,” said Ryhmy (1952), in which trouble would still find them in peacetime.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films so you don’t have to.
After fourteen years in a sinecure job at his father-in-law Johan’s company, Tommi (Antti Luusuaniemi) needs a raise in order to afford his dream house. His neighbour Juhis (Kari Ketonen) suggests that he gets involved in the boss’s birthday parachute jump – a family affair since Tommi’s pilot wife Harriet (Maria Ylipää) is flying the plane. But this is not the first time that Juhis, Harriet’s former Gulf War comrade, has dragged Tommi into trouble, and when faced with the half-mile drop to the land below, Tommi loses control of his bladder.
Harriet lands the plane on a pretext, and the men arrive at the party being thrown for Johan (Taneli Mäkelä). Tommi tries to give a resounding speech about how Johan has inspired him to be bold, unaware that the entire company of guests, including the fuming Johan, has just seen video footage of him pissing himself on a plane.
Without any hope of a promotion, Tommi resorts to cryptocurrency investment in order to scrape up the money, betting his house on a swift return. As he goes “all-in” on a life-changing risk, his business rival Patrick (Olavi Virta‘s Lauri Tilkanen, having a ball playing the bad guy again) sets up a series of situations that Johan can use to convince Harriet that Tommi is cheating on her.
The crypto company turns out to be a scam, and Tommi loses everything, including Harriet, who takes their daughter off to her father’s summer cottage, where Patrick commences a louche attempt to woo her. Discovering that the crypto company is run by Johan’s wayward brother Göran (Lasse Karkjärvi), Juhis and Tommi blag their way into prison posing as his lawyers, and persuade him to retrieve the money and hand it to Tommi, purely to spite Johan.
Juhis proves to Harriet that Tommi was set up, Tommi gets his money back, and all is well again, in this feature follow-up to the comedy series Luottomies (2016-21). The original series was an absolute joy – comprising 10-minute online shorts in which Juhis inevitably led the ineffectual Tommi into compromising situations reminiscent of Victor Meldrew’s misfortunes in One Foot in the Grave. This movie outing often feels lost in a longer format, and lacks the swift set-ups and slapstick pay-offs of the series that birthed it. Crucially, it leaves Juhis out of the action for long stretches – presumably because the actor who plays him is also the director, and has more to do on a film production. In the original, it was always Juhis whose well-intentioned schemes landed Tommi in deep water. Here, Tommi falls for the for the crypto scam all by himself, while Juhis dolefully observes that he only comes to him for help after secretly plotting to move away from the neighbourhood.
Finnish critics largely agreed, variously noting either that they missed the ten-minute set-up/joke of the originals, or that there was little point in a movie that didn’t go big. But for his feature, writer-director Kari Ketonen instead homes in on a different form of comedy tension, often invisible to outsiders: the cultural stand-off between Finns and Swedes. Tommi is repeatedly emasculated by the attitudes and expectations of his Renwall in-laws, who have all the money, sophistication and business smarts. He has even taken his wife’s surname, as Tommi Mäkinen-Renwall – in one of the film’s best gags, his angry father-in-law tells him to hand back the Renwall in the divorce settlement, “but you can keep the hyphen as a reminder.”
Despite the carping from the press, the movie also keeps to the spirit of the original in the sense that Juhis really is Tommi’s misguided guardian angel (luottomies, or literally “trust-man”). Although Juhis repeatedly creates difficulties for Tommi, he is also unfailingly there when he really needs him, and ultimately manages to save the day, in a successful reset-to-zero that allows the cast to all be in place ready for the next movie follow-up, Wingman: Sabbatical (2026), which takes the cast off to Spain. What could possibly go wrong?
Count Mauritz Armborg (Leif Wager) is packed off to Rome to study the violin, in a devious gambit by his family to keep him away from his true love, the butler’s daughter Katariina (Regina Linnanheimo). He stops just long enough to impregnate Katariina in a roadside inn, and Katariina throws herself off a cliff in grief, only to be rescued by her suitor, the honest fisherman Elias (Eino Kaipainen, formerly a leading man good enough for any red-blooded Finnish woman, now reduced to the supporting cast).
Seven years later, Elias handily dies from the plague (or something), freeing Katariina to dump her son Mauritz Junior (Marjo Kuusla) on a grieving mother, who whisks the boy off to Rome, where he is reunited with his father, who recognises the necklace he gave Katariina. He brings his long-lost son back to the manor in Finland, where his mother (Elsa Rantalainen) confesses to her machinations, all is forgiven, and the lovers are reunited.
Katariina ja Munkkinienen kreivi had a convoluted path to the screen, beginning as a last-ditch effort to salvage the costs sunk into an abortive historical drama about Karin Månsdotter (1550-1612), the queen consort of Sweden’s mad king Erik XIV. With the royal movie project shut down for reasons unclear, the Suomen Filmiteollisuus company was saddled with an entire warehouse full of costumes, and thrashed around in search of a story that would justify them. Eventually, a ready excuse was found in the form of a romantic novel, serialised in the Oulu local paper Sirpale from 1939-1940, by the same Kaarina Kaarna who had penned the earlier success Beautiful Regina of Kaivopuisto (1941). Nisse Hirn’s script adaptation was deftly polished by Toivo Särkkä with some smart changes for the change in medium – a dinner scene was transformed into a glittering dance, and Mauritz’s desire to be a painter, switched for the more soundtrack-friendly violinist.
And then the whole thing sat in limbo for a year, upended by the Winter War, losing its original director and stars, and finally flung together under Ossi Elstelä, with new face Leif Wager in the male lead. It was Elstelä who called the lyricist Reino Hirviseppä in Viipuri and asked for a “quick fix” – the result, dashed off in the following fifteen minutes, would become the film’s break-out song “Romanssi,” one of the most popular hits of Finland’s war years.
Buildings in Helsinki were found to stand in for the supposed globe-trotting scenery in Italy and Denmark, and the result was the box office smash of 1943, although the critics were less impressed. Hans Kutter in the Swedish-language Hufvudstadbladet ridiculed the novelist’s staple elements of “a man of high birth, a woman of the people, and the obligatory illegitimate child.” Olavi Vesterdahl in Aamulehti was similarly snide, calling it a “worthless pastime” fit only for “soppy schoolgirls and dreamy women.” Paula Talaskivi, the unshakeable oracle of Helsingin Sanomat, lamented the fact that anyone ever bothered to make such drivel any more. Toini Aaltonen, in the Suomen Sosiaalidemokraati was oddly aggressive, in what seemed to be a town-and-country stand-off, lampooning the “naïve” readers of Sirpale for falling for it all, and blaming them for the fact the film got made at all.
The press was more forgiving of leading man Wager, cooing enthusiastically about his chiseled good looks and gentlemanly manners. Talaskivi chided the film-makers for putting the 28-year-old Regina Linnanheimo in the role of a virginal teenager, and smartly suggested that the film might have made more sense if she’d swapped places with Sirka Sipilä, the 23-year-old actress who played Ingeborg, the spinster with whom Mauritz is forced into a loveless marriage. With the Finnish film industry now twenty-some years old, aging stars were becoming a thing – as noted up-blog in The Toilers of Rantasuo (1942), former male lead Eino Kaipainen was now in his forties and here, it seems, finally accepting the move into character roles with a degree of grace, albeit with a distractingly wispy beard.
Also popping in for long-term readers, the radiant Elsa Toivonen as a countess who encourages Katariina to marry for love: “I was sixteen when I was wed; seventeen when I had my first child, and my husband was twenty years older than me.” Elsa Rantalainen as Mauritz’s mother, trying to corner all the Scheming Old Bag roles, is, as ever, oddly persuasive in her arguments for Mauritz to Do the Right Thing.
Shunted onto television in a different era, the film was battered for the unintentional humour provided by all the histrionics. This viewer was left more curious about the implications that the costumes intended for a Karin Månsdotter drama set in the late 16th century should somehow be appropriate for a Finnish movie set in the 1860s. Maybe fashions don’t change so fast in the far north? The film’s finale is set in the year 1867, which is also the year that Månsdotter’s sarcophagus was renewed in Turku cathedral, so possiby the Månsdotter film had an 1860s framing device that would account for a bunch of the costumes.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films so you don’t have to.
A year after he massacred a bunch of smug Nazis who tried to steal his golden nuggets, retired Finnish commando Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila) drives over the newly drawn border with the Soviet Union in to the lost land of Karelia. It is revealed that he is one of the 420,000 Finns who fled Karelia when it was ceded to Russia in 1940, but that he intends to dismantle his old homestead, drive it back to free Finland, and rebuild in memory of his late wife and children.
Oh yes, about that… “Meanwhile, in Siberia” discredited Soviet death squad commander Igor Draganov (Stephen Frame) is sprung from prison and given a mission he can’t refuse. As he is the man whose atrocities drove Korpi to become the unstoppable “immortal” soldier, he should be the man to destroy him. Draganov sets off in pursuit of Korpi, who is doggedly driving a battered old truck across Karelia.
In my review of the first Sisu film, I speculated about the Mad Max: Fury Road and Indiana Jones image board that director Jalmari Helander might have in his office. This time, with Sisu 2: Road to Revenge, I would add a few choice moments from a bunch of other films, including William Friedkin’s truck-in-jeopardy movie Sorcerer, tips of the hat to the original Die Hard, and even Tom & Jerry. This over-the-top saga of Lumber in the Tundra sees Korpi dispatch an entire division of hapless Russian soldiers, with everything from his bare hands, to a handy missile, several useful poles, a bit of bent piping and a winch – I was the lone laugher in the Finnish cinema, while the locals around me seemed to be largely taking notes.
Some of the set-ups prove to be unnecessary dead ends – there’s a whole bit with a puukko knife that goes nowhere, and there are some odd anachronisms, like a Russian banquet that comprises crab sticks and Soave – and I felt that Helander missed a real trick by not featuring an onscreen massacre in which Korpi murders a bunch of Soviets with, say, a hammer and a sickle.
Helander also returns to what I’ve previously called his “Finland of the mind”, not only in terms of redressed Estonian locations, but of the very idea of Karelia as a liminal, thinning fairyland – a place that was once home, but is now seen slowly drowning in red weed. As I have mentioned before on this blog, 12% of the population of Finland were Karelian refugees in the 1940s, and that has translated in modern times to, at a rough guess, one in four of everybody’s grandparents. There is an overwhelming sense of melancholy and loss in Korpi’s return to his former homestead, and a gritty determination to repatriate it far in excess of the passion with which he went after his Nazi tormenters in the first film.
In a moving sequence of a talkoot, Korpi finds himself unexpectedly and briefly among friends. As an immigrant who has also been accepted by Finland after my homeland sold me out, I seemed to be the lone crier in the cinema, too.
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