Tuntematon Sotilas (Aku Louhimies, 2017)

Version 3.0 of The Unknown Soldier comes over 30 years after the second iteration and over sixty years after the first, furnished with a bigger budget and hence replete with bigger bangs and more artful photography, in partial justification of retelling the story once more and to ensure that this generation will also flock to see it in droves, although the top-selling Finnish novel ever is so revered that the screenplay pretty much writes itself as a plethora of key lines and scenes have to be adhered to. This does automatically run the risk of making the notion of a remake rather redundant.
The plot, in brief, follows one infantry company through the 1941-1944 Continuation War against the Soviet Union as the Finns first seek to regain what they lost under Soviet assault a year earlier and then, when the tide inevitably turns against them, to survive as an independent nation under the onslaught. The film adaptations assume the viewer's full familiarity with the history and also the characters of the novel, so there is little in the way of exposition for outsiders, but the utter lack of jingoism, glorification of war - even in defence of one's country - or exaggerated action still comes across clearly as does a fundamental cynicism about human motivations and a deep sense of omnipresent threat.
The combat scenes towards the end are overlong, hammering home the point of impending doom, and the three-hour-long film would have benefited from more fleshing out of peripheral characters instead of choosing to focus so heavily on the redrafted middle-aged farmer Rokka, a reluctant killing machine without any regard for authority, as charismatic the persona and the actor's performance may be. It's also easy to get the feeling that the Finnish army was all but wiped out simply because most of the named characters bite the bullet. Nevertheless, just as with the previous versions, one overriding uncommon virtue in the war film genre remains: it's so artless and unstylised that there is no doubt that this is really what it must feel like to face unseen and indifferent death.

7/10

Andið eðlilega (Ísold Uggadóttir, 2018)

And Breathe Normally cannot be described as uplifting viewing, but it is heartfelt, honest and pointedly avoids succumbing to melodrama. The paths of an Icelandic single mother struggling to stay above water and an African asylum seeker cross after the former, in her new job as a border guard officer, shops the latter for trying to enter the country with a forged passport. Her young son then bonds with the woman, who is facing imminent deportation, despite their having no common language. This is not given an improbable sugar-coating in any way and comes across in as natural a manner as the understated performances of the protagonists. The end may have a flicker of optimism, but it is fragile and double-edged.

6/10  

Kes (Ken Loach, 1969)

Seeing Kes for the first time 50 years after it was made (yes, I acknowledge the magnitude of the omission), I'm rather unfortunately struck at once by how many comic Northern stereotypes it has played a part in engendering. Men going down t'pit, people eating nothing but fish suppers, working-class people who seek to grind down anyone displaying signs of independent thought and terrible music acts at the local working men's club etc.
This is wholly unfair on the film, which is a bleak but sensitive portrayal of a teenage boy bullied on all sides finding solace with a kestrel that he nurtures. The dialects of the largely non-professional, local cast (a standard practice for Loach even then) present somewhat of a challenge to follow, even for locals 50 years down the line with all the dilution of regional differences that has occurred, and there isn't much hope on offer for a waning community. But the sincerity and indignant passion burn strong, and David Bradley as the young waifish lead is a revelation.

7/10

Mielensäpahoittaja (Dome Karukoski, 2014)

An adaptation of Tuomas Kyrö's hugely successful Finnish satirical novel The Grump (an unsatisfactory translation of the title, but then 'Self-upsetter' doesn't really roll off the tongue), this first of all has to deal with the tricky challenge of converting short first-person chapters of railing against some fault or other of the modern world into an actual story. The route taken is to have the fossilised and ultra-opinionated septuagenarian taken in temporarily by his wishy-washy hipster son and his family, and then letting the old git bounce off his exponentially increasingly riled daughter-in-law for comic effect as he rambles on self-righteously and bumbles about with all the aspects of modern life that he singularly fails to understand.
It doesn't take long before we're as irritated with him as she is, and this is in part something that can be avoided when exposed to the character on paper as, unlike a filmic story, a book can always be put down when it just gets to be too much. The characterisation begins to run the risk of ridiculing the aged as hopelessly stuck in the past, but then the fact that there is a linear narrative allows the director to steer the tone away from mere parody and round out the persona through providing some backstory to explain his intransigence and even achieve a degree of poignancy.
A number of the things he rails against will probably not travel well due to their specifically Finnish context, but nevertheless there are also many universal themes and the interaction between the stick-in-the-mud and his exasperated family works well to comic effect. It's not surprising that the author has followed this up with a whole series of books and that a film sequel was made recently: we're in a world which has changed drastically in every way in less than two generations, and the existence of a larger aged segment of the populace who are left behind by this rapid march onwards will continue to be a rich source to be mined for reflection and comedy alike.

6/10

Kätilö (Antti Jokinen, 2015)

It's 1944 in the very northernmost extremity of Finland on the coast of the Arctic Ocean and a young midwife struggles to bring new lives into the bleak world while the German army carries on systematically around her erasing the Russian populace in the lands they have conquered to the east of the border. Naturally, since this is a Finnish wartime film, she's as stoic as they come and the atmosphere is hopelessly grim. When she falls for a young half-Finnish SS officer, we might expect a glimmer of sunshine, but that is exactly what we get, deprecatingly, as a glint on a mirror that they play with in one scene.
The barren landscapes have to be counted as the star of Wildeye (lit. The Midwife, also known as Finland 1944) since they are imbued with more character than the cackling, rotten-toothed locals or identikit evil Nazis, and shot to impressive effect. The lead is a decent actress but is given little to project besides sullen resistance, the sporadic aerial bombardment scenes are technically ludicrous, and the romance is a sterile affair, much as the victims of the Germans are hardly fleshed out at all either. Add playing fast and loose with historical accuracy to all of this, while presenting it as gospel, and there isn't much of value left.

4/10

Downsizing (Alexander Payne, 2017)

Matt Damon decides to have himself shrunk to five inches in height to dramatically save on living expenses (and his carbon footprint, as the film pointedly keeps underlining). His wife chickens out of the process at the last minute, so he's left by himself in a city of other little people. So far, fine as the concept goes, and the natural way for this to proceed is as sci-fi comedy centring on the drawbacks of being tiny, with perhaps some touch of melancholia as the dream life turns out to be less than what was hoped for. Failing that, taking the route of the classic '50s B-movie The Incredible Shrinking Man, which plays with the miniature person conceit until logically and bleakly ending in existential oblivion.
But no, Payne wants to use the concept as a vehicle to deliver a message on ecological collapse and the impending extinction of the human race. Damon gets equipped as politically correctly as possible with a strident Vietnamese cleaner and amputee girlfriend, Christoph Waltz out-Schinkens all his previous performances (and that really takes some doing) as his face-pulling Serbian black marketeer mate and then they go to Norway to hear an impassioned speech by the scientist who invented the shrinking process and is taking the little people underground to continue the human race after the rest of it has been wiped out by some vaguely predicted combination of disasters.
The ingredients for something idiosyncratically interesting are all there at the outset - a director with a solid track record of quiet dramas with substance, such as The Descendants or Nebraska, a starting premise offering many avenues to go down and a capable cast. How it ends up as such a cringeworthy mess is quite a feat.

4/10

Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019)

Tarantino could hardly be suspected of mellowing with age, as disproved by the cartoonishly ridiculous ultraviolence of The Hateful Eight on his last outing, but the slower pace here - almost stationary at times - and concomitant lack of real incident, until a brief spurt in the finale, lend support to the idea that he's perhaps starting to steer away from his trademark hyperactivity. Of course, it's saturated in pop culture references and each dialogue is still liberally peppered with fucks, but for once there isn't a single 'nigger' to accompany them. It's almost as if he was trying to avoid upsetting people.
This is rather critical if the film is to work as a love song to a Hollywood in the settled wake of the summer of love. It's LA in 1969 and Leonardo DiCaprio's TV Western actor is nursemaided through a crippling attack of self-doubt by Brad Pitt his resolute stunt double and friend. The friendship between the pair, even as they do little else but drive around the endless sun-drenched city streets, have banal conversations and get trashed, feels solid and real, and is a major driver of the film alongside the perpetual TV and radio barrage of Californian hippy pop, rock and grating period commercials, allowing us to sail through its many potential longueurs.
When the spectre of the Manson family, set to commit the notorious massacre in the house next door, raises it head, then so too does the inevitability that we will get a bloody Tarantino climax after all. But even that doesn't transpire quite the way you'd expect. It's a definite change of direction from the enfant terrible director, and for the most part a welcome one.

7/10