2024 Top Ten List #10 The Missile (Ohjus)

 

Director Miia Tervo

THE MISSILE (Ohjus)                      A-                                                                                    Finland  Estonia  (114 mi)  2024  ‘Scope  d: Miia Tervo

Matti Nevala stood in the snow, looking sorrowfully at his melancholy tractor.                            —Esko, The Lapland News editor, hilariously reads aloud to Niina the lame introduction to her first story

What starts out as a zany comedy quickly turns into something else entirely, plunging into a more complex, in-depth examination of dysfunctional relationships and the havoc they wreak, as the abuse of domestic violence is beautifully interwoven into a tale of Finland’s subordinate relationship with Russia, as in each case bullying is the significant factor, requiring a radical shift to overcome an inequitable power dynamic that is emotionally and psychologically damaging.  Led by a phenomenal performance by Oona Airola as Niina, a fragile and insecure woman who transforms herself from a meek, easy to push around single mother of two children whose opinion matters to no one, to a confident, well-informed journalist who suddenly becomes an expert on the dangers of nuclear proliferation, refusing to be pushed aside by authorities as she continues to probe into matters of a government cover-up of mammoth proportions.  Part of what works so well is that she is such a tender, warm-hearted person, so to see her violently brutalized in such grotesque fashion is extremely affecting to viewers, adding an underlying dimension to this historical saga of Cold War political posturing and maneuvering, asking whether it’s possible to fully comprehend the danger lurking under the surface.  In some ways, this potentially disastrous international missile crisis bears a resemblance to Kubrick’s theater-of-the-absurd characterization in DR. STRANGELOVE OR:  HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964), perhaps the ultimate in Cold War satires.  Born and raised in the Finnish Lapland, writer/director Miia Tervo studied film at the Turku Arts Academy before completing her degree in documentary filmmaking at the Helsinki University of Art and Design.  Tervo’s adept storytelling weaves a seamless connection between the past and present, finding ways of defusing decades of national anxiety with a mix of melancholy and deadpan humor, offering a profound exploration of how historical dynamics continue to influence contemporary politics, as this beautifully directed film offers an unglamorous depiction of Scandinavian banality, where alcohol and cigarettes are everywhere, balancing outrageous humor with the in-depth complexities of the characters, accentuating the eccentricities of local personalities with the seriousness in the overall turn of dramatic events, with Niina continually finding herself in ludicrous situations, as authorities blatantly refuse to acknowledge the dire predicament they face.  Plunging viewers into a world of everpresent ice and snow may remind viewers of that sarcastically irreverent tone of the Coen brother’s Fargo (1996).  What starts out as a pleasant family outing, with Niina chopping down a small tree with her two children in tow, frolicking in the wintry snow of an immense forest, quickly turns into a disaster, as the cart carrying the tree comes unhitched, careening down a hill and crashing through a storefront window of a local business establishment in town, The Lapland News.  Apologizing profusely to the proprietor, local newspaper publisher Esko (Hannu-Pekka Björkman), Niina has no money to pay for the extensive damage, so she offers her services, willing to work to pay off her debt.  Initially given minor assignments, staying out of everyone’s way, like searching through the archives for material, she’s surprised to discover a general lack of seriousness in their coverage, where gossip or offbeat human interest stories with a local flair dominate what they print, where their biggest story was about a sock falling into an ice fishing hole, as according to Esko, “Nothing ever happens here.” 

This absurdist dramatic comedy is based on the real-life incident in 1984 of a Soviet SS-N-3 Shaddock surface-to-air missile straying from the Barents Sea, violating both Norwegian and Finnish air space before crashing into Lake Inari, or Inarijärvi, the largest lake in Sápmi, a sparsely populated area located in the northern part of Finnish Lapland (speaking their own dialect), some 150 miles north of the Arctic Circle, (retrieval of soviet missile which landed in finnish waters 28 ...).  While driving to her sister’s wedding, a thunderous sound can be heard off in the distance echoing through the skies, disturbing the quiet of the forest, with radio reports quickly revealing that a missile was fired into Finland from the Soviet Union, which becomes the backdrop of the film.  While Niina wants to pursue this story, aware of potential ominous ramifications, as it might have been carrying a nuclear warhead, where the damage to the pristine environment could be disastrous, Esko has other ideas, as he doesn’t want to upset the locals with such depressing talk.  Despite her limited knowledge as a reporter, Niina throws herself into the story anyway, refusing to accept the military’s explanation that this is a matter of no consequence and nothing to worry about, mocking her interest as simply misguided, rudely dismissing her as a woman while subjecting her to sexist discrimination, where even her family has a hard time taking her seriously, too self-absorbed to give the matter any thought, routinely accepting the word of authorities, believing she’s out of her league.  With her abusive ex-husband Tapio (Tommi Eronen) in prison for assault, the frequently overwhelmed Niina has to take care of the children alone.  Making matters worse, she just lost her bakery job before Christmas and she’s facing personal challenges, not the least of which is her ex-husband is expected to be released soon from prison.  Despite having no training beyond writing “poems about ponies” in school, Niina launches a one-woman investigation into the slowly developing mystery, laboriously searching through the archives, interviewing every quirky character in town, becoming a fervently educated voice for a misinformed community.  The tension escalates when a contingent of serious-looking Finnish military brass descends on the local hotel, but refuse to offer any explanation to the press, with the film illustrating a stark contrast between a secretive and tight-lipped Finland and the more freely reported news in both Norway and Sweden, as Finland could simply not admit that it was a missile.  Looking for leads, Niina strikes up a relationship with a handsome Finnish Air Force pilot Kai Repola (Pyry Kähkönen) who witnessed the incident, hinting that an errant Soviet nuclear cruise missile may be involved.  Their rapport turns intimate, an unexpected romantic diversion, while at the same time Niina’s sister Kaisa (Emma Kilpimaa) has her own wedding that she does not wish to be spoiled, while Niina’s own dysfunctional relationship with her domineering mother Hanski (Milka Ahlroth) is quite striking, as her mother still views her as a child and apparently can’t help but undermine Niina at every turn, continually devaluing her sense of worth, exposing yet another layer of past trauma and abuse, so when her mother says that Finland is a country troubled by a sense of inferiority and unworthiness, Niina knows the feeling.

Sharing a one thousand mile border with Russia and a 1948 border agreement (Finno-Soviet Treaty of 1948 - Wikipedia), the Finnish government initially classified the incident as a UFO.  And while hotel owners were happy with the extra business, including an international press clamoring for information, this becomes the biggest international news event in the history of the Inari region, turning into a real media circus, where the government was simply not interested in making this a matter of consequence, and was certainly not interested in airing possible differences in public.  In an era of political uncertainty, on the eve of US-Soviet disarmament talks in Geneva, where United States Secretary of State George Shultz was about to meet with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, governments downplayed the incident, where at first the Soviet Union made no comment, while in Finland soldiers scoured the border area by helicopter and snowmobile in the bitter cold, with officials quietly checking with Moscow to see what had happened, as apparently a missile escaped from a military training exercise during a target test.  While the missile itself fell in Inarijärvi, Tervo’s film was actually filmed in Pelkosenniemi and Kemijärvi, where the Kemijärvi Cultural Centre is transformed into the fictional restaurant-hotel Tunturipeikko, with the director claiming “We wanted a film to have a milieu built on locals, not tourists.”  To that end, despite the grim implications, local eateries take advantage of the situation by creating rocket-themed fish dishes and missile-shaped donuts, which quickly sell out.  Making light of the incident is an all too human reaction, with the military continuing to downplay any significance, yet their very presence in such large numbers defies that position, with Niina continually pressing them on just exactly what happened, where her archivist position at the newspaper allows her to fully investigate other incidents and the devastatingly harmful impact on the environment, becoming one of the more persistent voices of the community, and an irritant to the military who grow tired of seeing her.  As Niina obsesses about the missile’s truth and the nation’s boundaries, she confronts the truth about her own personal boundaries, as her overcontrolling ex-husband is released from prison and wants to spend more time with the children, even hoping they could pick up the pieces of their marriage with promises of change, but it is only a matter of time before his true colors show themselves with a horrifically brutal beating, which is simply a shocking development, putting everything else in perspective, where unchecked power has a way of steamrolling its way through malicious, out of control behavior.  This humanized development is extremely effective, where the bully on the block shows its true stripes, as the film masterfully captures the essence of mistreatment and humiliation, reflecting the harsh reality that the citizens and the nation must learn to defend themselves against abuse.  Niina’s persistence in hounding the military for the truth finally pays off when they discover the missile is submerged under the lake, and she’s invited to watch the rather precarious retrieval, which is witnessed by the entire international media and world.  The period soundtrack is fabulous, with Bronski Beat’s No More War, No More War (Remastered) YouTube (4:01), Alphaville’s Forever Young (“…are you gonna drop the bomb or not?”), Alphaville - Forever Young (Official Video HD) YouTube (3:42), and Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark’s Enola Gay, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark - Enola Gay (Official ... YouTube (3:34), fittingly playing while Niina and her family drink in excess and dance in slo-mo, where the irony is not lost that they could soon be obliterated.  The way this film deflects an enormous distortion of reality through absurdist humor and outlandish local character makes this a delight to experience, effortlessly evoking a myriad of emotions while crafting an amalgamation of contrasting genres and tones, becoming a moving essay on the importance of self-worth, accentuated by such an empowered, deeply humane performance by Oona Airola that makes this immensely appealing.

Universal Language (Une Langue Universelle)

 

Québec premier François Legault

Director Matthew Rankin

Matthew Rankin as Groucho Marx in 1988

UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE (Une Langue Universelle)      B                                             Canada  (89 mi)  2024  d: Matthew Rankin

We were looking for ourselves in each other.                                                                                —a line from Sergei Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates (1969) that was crucial for this film’s creation according to the press notes, where Matthew Rankin also hilariously interviews himself, A Film by Matthew Rankin PRESSKIT 

Among the more original films you can see, described by the director as a “surrealist comedy” and an “autobiographical hallucination,” raising questions of identity, displacement, and cultural intersections, where anyone who can appreciate the absurdity of Guy Maddin’s MY WINNIPEG (2007) can appreciate the hilarious irreverence of this film.  Existing in a netherworld between Winnipeg, Tehran, and the social realist aesthetic of Iranian films, yet also Montreal after the 1995 Quebec referendum, when the French-speaking province attempted to break away from the rest of Canada, but  lost, refusing to let it go, still immersed in a hotbed of Québécois nationalism, exacerbating a continual dispute between Anglo and Francophone culture, so it’s hard to tell just exactly where we are at any given moment, as this appears to be more of a state of mind film, a somewhat demented adaptation of the director’s own life, where he plays the central character Matthew, a rather passive, melancholic, absurdly Kafkaesque Josef K figure who leaves the cultural comforts of Montreal for the wintry wasteland that is Winnipeg.  Perhaps the biggest surprise is that the entire film is filtered through the Iranian Farsi language, supposedly “in the name of friendship,” as an early title card reads, inspired by Iranian films of the 1970’s, which were largely humanistic children’s fables, with an opening dedication to a fictional Winnipeg Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, otherwise known as Kanoon (Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children & ...), a real-life Iranian entity associated with the early works of Abbas Kiarostami, an open tribute to the first installment of his famous Koker trilogy, WHERE IS THE FRIEND’S HOUSE (1987), with its blending of fiction with reality/documentary, exactly as Rankin did in an early short from 2008, Self-Portrait M.Rankin YouTube (2:56), yet somehow it’s all transferred into Canada of the present, reimagined where Persian and French are the two official languages, and English is non-existent.  Something of a mishmash of recurring vignettes and set pieces, with the director acknowledging “Iranian cinema emerges from 1000 years of poetry, while Canadian cinema emerges from 40 years of discounted furniture ads,” the film is full of sight gags, deadpan Tatiesque humor, weirdly eccentric characters, like a man dressed as a Christmas tree, and plenty of wild turkeys!  Premiering in Director’s Fortnight at Cannes where it won the first ever Audience Choice Award, this breezy, light-hearted film is easy to like, shot in a beautifully grainy 16mm look from Isabelle Stachtchenko, using almost entirely non-professionals, while shot on a shoestring budget, where despite the whimsical spirit, there’s a deep sense of loneliness embedded beneath the surface.  The director was present during the screening, and he’s extremely witty in person, filled with hilarious rants and caustic observations, where he’s especially critical of the Québec film industry, believing they make dreadfully anguishing existential films that plunge us into the depths of despair and simply exist in their own soulless purgatory.  This parallel universe appears to be an uplifting remedy, supposedly drawn from the director’s own “meaningless” life, with no real main character, but several stories told in parallel, taking us into a world of omnipresent snow with a Stalinist landscape of colorless brick and concrete buildings (the director’s favorite) or highway overpasses with trucks rolling by and endless traffic noise, where somewhere in this labyrinthean maze of dead ends exists the human soul.    

Taking a page out of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses (Kuru Otlar Üstüne) (2023), the film opens under a blanket of snow with a French immersion teacher Mr. Bilodeau (Mani Soleymanlou) arriving late before berating his primary school classroom for numerous offenses, such as the noisy outbursts they were making before he arrived, “Please, would you at least have the decency to misbehave in French?,” yet when he asks what their future careers will look like in a Woody Allen Annie Hall (1977) moment, where we discover a student dressed like Groucho Marx (the director reports he did this as a child), or a budding donkey breeder, he concludes that “all of you will fail,” offering little hope for human survival before having them read a sentence on the blackboard, “We are lost forever in this world.”  That is our introductory moment into this film, where the name of the Robert H. Smith school is written in Persian lettering, a theme that continues for the duration of the film, with all the men referred to as “agha,” a Farsi term of endearment, like addressing someone as sir.  On their way home from school, two young female grade school students, Negin (Rojina Esmaeili) and her sister Nazgol (Saba Vahedyousefi), happen upon a 500 riel bill (a play on Iranian rial currency) frozen under the ice, asking a nearby man in purple earmuffs, Massoud (Pirouz Nemati), if he can help, but he steers them to a friend in a nearby turkey store to borrow an axe to chip away the ice, steadfastly deferring their requests that he go borrow the axe, since it’s his friend, but the man insists that he stay, sending them on a wild goose chase through Winnipeg’s shopping neighborhoods, named appropriately beige, brown, and grey districts, each looking eerily the same, the washed out colors blending indistinctly into the other, where it’s hard to tell the difference.  The kids are turned away at every turn, with no one offering a hint of interest, leaving them to navigate this maze of corridors and barren alleyways that all seem to lead to nowhere.  By the time they actually have success, it has grown dark outside and the riel note has already been chipped out of the ice, where the kids are thwarted in their quest, with a deceiving Massoud the likely suspect in outwitting these kids.  A continuously surprising meditation on being away from home and then being unable to find one’s way back, as nothing is remotely the same, having been transformed in our absence, this outrageously eccentric satire hits buttons we’ve never even imagined until brought to light in this outlandish manner.  The origin of this film may be the director’s early fascination with foreign films, as they spoke to him in a way that few English-language films ever had, and even traveled to Iran at one point, where the beauty of the experience was seeing the world differently, where we recognize ourselves in each other, sharing common interests, becoming a wacky, off-kilter exploration of cultural identity, where there’s even an appearance of a memorable song from the 60’s, These eyes - The Guess Who (1969) YouTube (3:58), but the object of affection here is a prized turkey!  Placing an emphasis on human connections and intercultural coexistence, a recurring motif is misdirection and random miscommunication, as characters continually seek ways to connect to each other, becoming part of a larger human collective, but when they lose that interconnectedness and sense of community, they can become lost and disoriented in a baffling mix of muddled confusion.  In a strange twist of fate, Omid (Sobhan Javadi), the son of Massoud loses his glasses, but when one of the girls retrieves them and he puts them back on near the end, the roles of Matthew and Massoud mysteriously switch, signaling how easily we misinterpret the world around us because we lack the correct perspective.     

In a parallel story of alienation and a longing for identity, we see Matthew playing a version of himself as he resigns his menial civil servant position in the Québec government to move back home to Winnipeg to visit his ailing mother.  Taking place in a giant room under a large portrait of Québec premier François Legault, a lone table sits off to the side in the corner where a government official steers Matthew away from making any criticisms of the Québec government, indicating he may make positive or neutral remarks, but nothing negative, causing him to utter with the utmost sincerity, “My time here was by far the most neutral experience of my life.”  Ironically, in a nearby cubicle, a man can be heard and occasionally seen sobbing profusely, obviously a sign of extreme unhappiness, yet the cause remains a mystery.  On the bus to Manitoba a woman passenger complains bitterly that a prized live turkey is given its own seat next to her, yet the driver informs her that this special bird has won avian beauty contests and is a paying customer.  Throughout this film various people contend they clearly supported Quebec’s right to independence in the referendum vote, where it’s likely more people say that after the vote, as if in hindsight that’s politically correct, at least in Québec, though it’s hardly an indicator of how they actually voted.  Once back in Winnipeg, Matthew is forced to idle his afternoon time away at a Tim Horton’s (Always Fresh! transformed into an Arabic teahouse with donuts) while awaiting a designated appointment with someone after work, as he’s blindsided by the discovery that his mother has moved to a different address and is now living with a total stranger that she mistakenly believes is him, no longer recognizing him anymore.  In a bemused portrait of an alternative universe, we see a series of strange and mysterious happenings, among which include a barrage of cheesy television ads from Hafez Ghamghosar (Bahram Nabatian), a singing turkey expert in a pink cowboy hat, claiming he has the best turkeys anywhere, anytime, with a look that’s right out of the VHS era of the 1970’s, a surreal glimpse into a Kleenex repository, a lavish all-hours bingo parlor, a shop that sells only birthday cakes, or a billboard bearing Justin Trudeau’s face and the slogan “a strong economy helps to prevent feelings of worthlessness.”  Yet we also follow the baffling exploits of Massoud in the purple earmuffs as a self-appointed Winnipeg tour guide, where he leads a small following who gripe their way through an endless cold and windswept journey to some of the most unglamorous and drably uninteresting sites imaginable, like tall windowless buildings, parking lots, and abandoned shopping centers, where they discover “the Great Parallel Parking Incident of 1958,” a memorial to Métis leader Louis Riel, founder of the province of Manitoba (executed by the government for his role in the North-West Rebellion), which is basically a snow pile located between a freeway and an exit ramp, a deserted shopping mall fountain with no running water, meaning “All wishes are canceled,” suggesting residents are hoping for the water to someday return, or a “Forgotten Briefcase” left behind decades ago on a bus stop bench that no one has touched, thinking the owner may still come to retrieve it, becoming a UNESCO World Heritage site and “a monument to absolute inter-human solidarity, even at its most basic and banal,” where a sense of Canadian mediocrity exists around every corner.  Written by Ila Firouzabadi (who plays a bus driver), Pirouz Nemati, and Matthew Rankin, nothing ordinary happens here, as it’s all simply imagined from the deranged mind of Rankin who clearly has a thing for movies, as this will take you on an amusement park roller coaster ride the likes of which you’ve never seen.  And in case you didn’t know it before, laughter is a universal language.