User Reviews

In 2012, the world is much different than it was in 1969. Or our 2012, for that matter.

The official review of the Institute of History, after the restless 60s and 70s, shows that society has become liberal, with class boundaries no longer existing and progress being the goal of all.

Documentarian Raimo Lappalainen (Arto Tuominen) is looking back at the Finland of the late 60s and making a movie about sex symbol Saara Turunen (Ritva Vepsä), a nude model who dies at some point in the 70s. But as he gets deeper into her life, he discovers that the same issues that her world struggled with haven't truly gone away. Things get stranger when Kisse (Vepsä) to play the role of Saara in a recreation of her death. Ironically, this film's director Risto Jarva would die young in a car crash in 1977.

The future that this movie promised is one of people dancing by themselves in crowded clubs while wearing headphones, politically compromised media, Edie Sedgwick-looking doomed heroines, pushbutton instant food, unrest in a nuclear plant and inflatable see-through furniture. I really should start a Letterboxd list of movies that have transparent furnishings starting with this movie, Too Beautiful to Die and Camille 2000.

Also: I learned from Kathy Fennessy's Seattle Film Blog that co-writer Peter von Bagh -- who worked on the script along with Jarva and Jaakko Pakkasvirta -- wrote his master's thesis on Vertigo, which makes the dead woman being reborn -- or at least a look-a-like appearing -- make even more sense.

By the end, Lappalainen seems like no hero, as the leader of the protests who mentions the title of the movie before being killed live on TV, an event that shatters Kisse and barely a notice from him. He seeks to control her in his work, using her as an object instead of a person; this follows through to his real life.

I am obsessed by the ancient future. The time that seemed like it would be cleaner and perhaps better than the world that we live in today. Would it truly be a better place? This movie makes me doubt that. It would, however, be much more stylish.

Back in the '70s Risto Jarva was among my favorite directors, based on his social-consciousness films and documentaries and his delightful final classic free-spirit movie "Year of the Hare". This feature venturing into speculative science fiction is a movie about ideas, not SPFX and the usual sci-fi trappings.

It is set in 2012, with an early recap and what's happened in the intervening years -namely the creation of a war-free stable world in which class distinctions and the ideological battles between Communism and Capitalism (or religious factions and tribal separations) have been eradicated. The future state is prosperous and based on a technocracy with contented populations sharing in nearly Utopian fashion.

The anti-hero Raimo is a civil servant, a scientist in the History Institute, who is smug, self-centered, and utterly convinced of his role as an objective historian. His seeming friends are quickly revealed to be plotting against him, to reveal his manipulative tactics and bring him down.

The ensnare him easily in a scheme whereby he is planning to tell, using documentary filmmaking as his mode (a nod to Jarva's profession) a story of an "ordinary person", in line with his almost mystical belief in the sociology of such folk. He becomes obsessed, not unlike the great Preminger movie "Laura", with a model turned actress named Saara who died while shooting a movie back in 1976. With is so-called friends' help, he discovers Kisse, an exact lookalike, still young, model who he enlists to play Saara in his re-creation movie. She is in league with the anti-Raimo buddies.

With an outstanding and eclectic original music score that deftly integrates avant-garde jazz into the mix (think late '60s pioneers like Pharoah Sanders and Andrew Hill), the movie establishes its futurism, now in the past of course 4 years after 2012, economically with simple costuming, believable technology and some nice cultural changes such as everyone into dancing with emphasis on hand movements (like Middle Eastern or Indian dancers, speaking via gesture). There is a modicum of nudity that has relegated this film unfairly to the "softcore exploitation" pigeon hole, even being released by Something Weird Video with English subtitles, a very odd bird in its catalog.

SPOILER ALERT:

Jarva integrates many of his themes into the picture, including a pivotal strike by workers at a nuclear power plant that is a key event in the narrative. The hero's ruthlessness and callousness are very well portrayed by both actor and script, and the ending is quite tough- minded. The hero ends up in a drunken stupor, celebrating the broadcast on the propaganda TV channel of his documentary "The Face of the Past". Kisse, who he fell in love with, died in a preventable accident shooting the climax of his film, and all he could come up with as a reaction was "Did the camera get the whole thing?", more interested in his precious footage than in her life. As he lies unconscious, about to suffocate in the modern plastic contraption that passes for a modular sofa, we hear a familiar Communist anthem being sung, which refers to a future time of roses for everyone, echoing an earlier reference to weeds for the common man, roses for the wealthy as Jarva even-handedly criticizes both the competing ideologies of his time - a liberal welfare state form of capitalism vs. the autocratic, top-down Communist and Socialist systems.