User Reviews

Kun taivas putoaa... is a film from 1972 directed by Risto Jarva, telling stories about world of press. If and when the Actors drink booze at the very beginning of the movie, then it can be believed that the movie will be looking for something different.

At the beginning of the film, the viewer enters the story, which is like a diary, or at least the form of narration gives it the atmosphere at the beginning. Life is a lot of work, and it shows in the film. The role of work as part of everyday life. As a viewer, I sensed that the film's style is somewhere between fiction and documentary. I can't tell which one it is, and that bothers me a little. Maybe I'm thinking too much, maybe I should just let the story take me?

The world familiar to many of us comes right in front of us in the film, when the main character talks to the masseuse about life's big questions. The masseuse can be told things that are difficult to tell the viewer with the help of a story. I think the method is well used and effective.

The world of the film is like a snapshot of time and a perception as a part of Helsinki. The street scene and the streets have been immortalized and it makes me as a viewer think about the past times in Helsinki. Sometimes I still wonder if the narrator is the same person as the main character. Or are they two separate persons. I feel like I don't really understand, but maybe that's the point of this movie.

In this Finnish film, the role of the narrator is memorable, but somehow the narration itself slows down at the halfway point. It bothers me a bit towards the end of the movie. This work has many elements of an art film. Watching it is a different experience than a traditional fiction film. I think there is something secretive, mysterious, and waiting here. The main character looks at the camera in a few pictures, and that in itself is a special effect. I think the film has been made in a small budget way, but the resources have been well utilized. The soundscapes are interesting and different, which also make the plot more tense. Fascinating atmosphere of an old Finnish film!

Like Jarva's science-fiction foray Ruusujen aika, this film deals with media manipulation and a man's obsession with a mystified woman. Pajala plays Olli Meri, a cynical, alcoholic reporter in a tabloid magazine devoted to sensationalist exposés dripping with sex and violence. His one lifeline seems to be his visits to Haukinen's Eila Tuomi, a physiotherapist and a single mother. However, when he learns that she is having an affair with a married politician, he is quick to turn it into a lurid front page-burner that makes the naïve and benevolent Tuomi seem like a Whore of Babylon wannabe. This is where the film is at its best, as it juxtaposes scenes of jaded reporters churning out their scandal sheets and dismissing any responsibility of their produce with those of Tuomi finding her own face staring at her dozen-fold from every newsagent, being promptly ostracised by her friends and getting ogled at and harassed on the street by men who think she is fair game. Both the morally-upright "decent" people and the "trash" whose exploits make the headlines they read with indignant delight, come across as sleazy and hypocritical.

However, after this the film becomes erratic, veering occasionally into melodrama and heavy-handed antics, as Meri and Tuomi drift ever deeper into a cage of mutual dependency, possessiveness and abuse. Most of the latter half of the film is a mélange of self-pitying despair that is the clichéd domain of the stereotypical Finnish man, and frolicking copulations already in danger of becoming just as clichéd half a decade after the sexual liberation had hit the Finnish screens. But the scene of a boat carrying Meri and Tuomi slowly sinking into the lake to the accompaniment of Kaj Chydenius' solemn organ music is absolutely haunting and seems to tap into the imagery of Kalevala and other Finnish national mythology for extra resonance. In all its contrition it stays with you long after everything else has faded from memory like last week's headlines.

While the film as a whole is flawed, it has two undeniable strengths. First, the principal cast are excellent: with his bat-wing eyebrows and shaggy beard and hair, Pajala comes across as a run-down Mephistopheles desperately seeking a loophole in his own, seemingly unquestionable contract that is destroying both his body and soul, while Haukinen gets a surprisingly lot out of her role as another woman alternatively depicted as a child, victim and an inscrutable object of desire torturing the male imagination.

Second, while Meri's heavy voice-over narration might seem clumsy, it actually drives home the point about the subjectivity of its author. Meri explains the unfolding of events and the inner workings of people around him with patronising superiority and classical allusions, but what we see on the screen often does not tally with his impressions. This casts a doubt over everything he says, including the final, agonised admission of personal responsibility and the price paid by the individual for his big stories - in fact over the whole notion of truth he claims to have told us now, but which he has shown to be easily manipulated against its spirit, even while preserving its letter. This question of truth in media or in any narrative makes the film relevant far beyond its story and Jarva's depiction of early-1970s Finnish society.