finland

Lapland Odyssey (Director: Dome Karukoski): I’ve always been a fan of Nordic com­edies so it was a treat to see this on the last day of this year’s TIFF. I also have a very tiny con­nec­tion with Lapland. When trav­eling in Europe by myself in 1989, I had an unlim­ited rail­pass, so one day while I was in Helsinki, I decided to cross the Arctic Circle. 18 hours later by train and I was in Kemijärvi. I wandered around for about two hours and then got right back on the train to Helsinki. Mission accomplished.

I think that sort of mad determ­in­a­tion also drives our hero Janne. Well, per­haps not at first. Ever since his busi­ness went bank­rupt five years ago, he’s lived on wel­fare. There aren’t many jobs in Lapland, but at least he has a wife. Most of the women even­tu­ally move south, but he’s been with Inari for nine years, although her patience with his leth­argy is wearing thin. When she gives him money to buy a “digibox” so they can tune in cable tele­vi­sion, he sits around all day and misses the store’s closing time, pre­fer­ring to hang around with his lay­about friends Kapu and Tapio. She gives him an ulti­matum. Return by 9:00am the next morning with a digibox or she’ll be gone. He’s also spent the money she gave him on beer, so he and his pals will have to earn some money overnight too.

It’s a Friday night, so his first idea is that they’ll use Tapio’s car to run a freel­ance taxi ser­vice out­side the local hotel bar. That doesn’t go too well when they run out of gas and decide to siphon some from Inari’s ex-boyfriend. When they finally get to the hotel, the real cab­bies take umbrage, but Janne ends up finding a rather unique task where he can earn some money; that is, if he can avoid tempta­tion. Meanwhile, mama’s boy Tapio just may have found the woman of his dreams. I won’t spoil the rest of the plot, but it turns into a sort of quest movie in which the heroes are very dim indeed.

As with all Nordic farces, there’s a dark under­cur­rent of gloom and fatalism. In this case, it’s Janne’s friend Kapu, whose ancestors going back five gen­er­a­tions have given in to des­pair and hanged them­selves from a par­tic­ular tree in the vil­lage. In a clever pro­logue, we see their reasons (one involved hockey!), and it seems that Kapu might be headed the same way if his cir­cum­stances don’t change soon. Because this is a comedy, I don’t think I’ll spoil any­thing by saying that Kapu doesn’t kill him­self. In fact, things turn out rather well for our gang of dimwits.

Lapland Odyssey uses both the beauty and strange­ness of its far northern set­ting to great effect. Although we laugh at the very lim­ited oppor­tun­ities Janne has to earn money, we also sym­pathize with his lack of inertia. When he does even­tu­ally decide to fight to keep the love of his wife, he’s pretty hard to stop. Although none of the char­ac­ters really changes all that much (a bril­liant deus ex machina moment occurs at the end of the film which will leave you grin­ning), we see the begin­ning of a desire to change, and that’s enough.

Granted, this is not the most ori­ginal plot, at least in its gen­eral out­line, but the set­ting and char­ac­ters are just spe­cific enough to make this a unique sort of road movie.

(7/10)

Tagged as: #tiff10, arctic, finland, lapland, road-movie

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