Helene

I saw this film on Sunday it was pretty good, particularly Pirkko Saisio who played Helene's mother Olga and who is always cross/disgusted/repelled/irritated. 

Eero Aho and Pirkko Saisio in Helene

I don't want to give too much away and spoil it but there are two things you should know when you go to see this film, and I feel OK saying this because I really suspect that for most viewers, this is knowledge they would have going in. One is that Helene Schjerfbeck was 60something (or approaching it) in the 19teens-twenties when the events in this film are taking place. However, Laura Birn who plays her was only just about to turn 40, and I don't even care what cinema conventions are - you can't know that a 40sish woman (person!) is playing a person at least a decade and a half older unless at very least someone says 'Helene, you have been on this earth 58 years now and...' The other thing is that, well, this is embarrassing but I didn't know that Helene Schjerfbeck was real and I was really perplexed why all the paintings she was doing in the movie varied so much in style and even subject - if you know what I mean. They looked like three different people had done them and I thought, 'at least be consistent with these approximations of paintings from a hundred years ago'. Well, turns out she had a long and varied career and she tried on a lot of different styles over that time. 

This last image is of Einar (played by Johannes Holopainen) who she has a pretty solid thing for over most of the movie, and that is one thing I am not entirely sure about - I'm naive but really I have to wonder, what's so good about Einar? But overall I found it a pretty sumptuous, if slightly gloomy, film with a lot of very beautiful Finnish countryside and some pretty amazing actors. 

Oh one more thing. A lot is made of them writing letters to each other. Einar goes to Lapland and Helene says, we will write each other a long letter. Great idea, Helene! We never get any sense of what was in each other's letters, and we see quite a bit of Einar in Lapland but no sense he is writing a letter at all. Weird. At the end of the movie we are told that the two of them wrote each other over a thousand letters. Well... cool... in the film all they seemed to do was talk about it.

Oh also my brother (who I saw the film with) later referred to the subdued sex scene. I'll tell how subdued it was. I didn't even realise it was a sex scene. Hott.