interpreters Seidi Haarla, Yuri Borisov
premiere 13 April 2022
A young Finnish woman studying architecture in Moscow and a very macho young Russian meet in the same compartment of a train that takes them to the city of Murmansk, where they go to see some cave paintings and she works in a mine. They don’t look alike. Gets drunk and insults him. He is sending missed messages to his Russian girlfriend. But from the very first moment it is felt that sooner or later there will be a hint of connection and that one thing will lead to another, although this is by no means a romantic melodrama with a happy ending.
This Finnish movie two completely opposite characters sometimes seen as a species. A more dour and dark variation of ‘before sunrise’, is the first installment of Richard Linklater’s famous trilogy, but the heroes who met on a train in that movie also had a few more things in common. Here it is about showing how, despite the initial rejection it provoked in the girl, intimacy takes place within a certain normality. The train’s different stops look for exits to the concrete and exterior. oppressive area of chamber sixand in these short passages disagreements and differences tend to be resolved. Both are characters who need something they didn’t have at the time, and Juho Kuosmanen, the director of an earlier and interesting feature film about a boxer, manages to lend them ‘The happiest day in Olli Mäki’s life’ (2016). the reliability of this approach, which is lacking in both discovery and reliability.