Midnight Sun Film Festival 2023 -- Film #9
Aki Kaurismäki's newest film is probably the most important Finnish film of the century so far and it's also one of Kaurismäki's most minimalistic works. As the far-right is coming to power in Finland with devastating politics planned, the film's importance will be impossible not to feel. I was crying and laughing so much. One of the most unique movie-going experiences of my life so far.
I wrote about the film and…
I haven't had this refreshing feeling after a film since I rewatched Inherent Vice last year when news were showing nothing but shit. It's like feeling cold or otherwise dirty and going to warm sauna after a hard day and then coming out, taking something to drink and feel like world makes sense even if it is only for few seconds until it starts to wear off. This is for me the only way to describe Wild at Heart -…
A Finnish fantasy/fairytale oddity with anarchistic undertones -- not Witikka's first fantasy film, but the first I've seen from him. In addition to Valentin Vaala with Ihmiset suviyössä (1948), Witikka takes great use of Martti Katajisto's strangely innocent face. Whereas the effect is contrasting in the former film where he plays a boy pretending to be a man, here it's quite a literal but still an effective choice. I love how Helsinki is used in this film to create an…
Mika Taanila's David Bowie tribute and an immersive, space-oriented recut of The Man Who Fell on Earth shows that there is a whole world within a film, a whole world that is probably missed when we focus too much on the narrative. A fun attempt to create a world with a film from the details of another film (and world).
After watching this film, I realized I'm never going to be film critic or scholar. This beautiful feeling that I'm feeling cannot be put to words. I've realized that the greatest films are something about what you can write and write, try to open them and their beauty, try to ease your burden and wonderment but you simply can't put them to words. I've loved film theory but after a film like this, I can't help but to pretty much…
Some say that women are always over-analyzing everything. Well, men are trying to justify everything they do (especially their desires) with the most idiotic and weirdest (to the point where they don't make sense) justification. For a while I watched the film without realizing anything what was going on. Conversations. Well, they are French. At some points I started thinking about how creepy these situations actually were. It wasn't until the last conversations between Jerome and Aurora that I realized…
