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I'm about half way through watching this Finnish thriller on SBS - for English-speaking markets it's called East of Sweden which is a pretty ridiculous title (admittedly I'm only half way through but it has no connection to East of Eden though I suppose yeah you have to admit that Finland is east of Sweden and it's true one of the characters does apparently at one point aspire to go to Sweden but still...). The original title is Kääntöpiste which means 'turning point' which I guess is about as non-specific as you need it to be. 

So far it's quite well-constructed (bizarrely like about half of the Finnish films I've seen in the last year it also features Laura Birn!). But what's really strange is the amount of shots where the boom is visible. I guess if this happened once you'd go, well, once is ok. But this is so frequent I'm almost wondering if it's deliberate! 

It's not always as obvious as above but it can still be pretty flipping obvious, particularly once you start noticing. Weird!!!

Anyway, not a terrible film and it does feature some things I love like Finland, trains and... that's about it. Actually it just occurred to me that most of the action is taking place in Oulu, which is a city I love, though we haven't seen any notable streetscapes yet, I hope we do. 

A lot of it is in English I'm not sure why. 

any day now/ ensilumi

This is a really fine movie about asylum seekers in Finland which is apparently based on the writer-director's own experience. However even without the pervading tension/fear that dominates the film (the family is waiting to hear if its request for asylum will be granted) it would still be a very impressive coming-of-age story. The actor who plays Ramin, the young boy at the centre of the film, is Aran-Sina Keshvari and he is excellent, but the whole cast is tremendous. I saw this about a week before Helene and I was trying to place Laura Birn, who's the star of that film, and finally I got it - she has a small part in this as Ramin's teacher. 

It's called Ensilumi in Finnish which means 'first snow', to my mind a better title than Any Day Now which puts focus on the family's wait for news of their status, rather than on their experiences in a new environment, though I am also intrigued by what is not mentioned in this film: not once is there an explanation of where they have come from or on what grounds they are seeking asylum, etc. That's actually fine, but does it make us as an audience start to regard them as 'everyfamily' or does it make us wonder why even more? 

Note the first quote on the poster above which translates rather rattily via google translate as 'life-affirming First Snow is a star bead that radiates the warmth and light of the heart of domestic film autumn.' Of course what caught my eye was the word 'helmi' which I had not realised was not merely a name (the middle bit of 'Wilhelmina', which is why I chose Helmi as the best Finnish woman's name for a beloved cat) but also the Finnish word for 'bead' (or more commonly I think 'pearl'). 'Tähden' means 'at', 'for', or 'for the sake of', which is fine, but believe it or not 'tähden helmi' means 'star bead', which only leads me to wonder what the helmi a 'star bead' is. But it's 'all good'.

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.