This fantasy film set in the future portrays above all else what tendencies the artists behind the film thought of as relevant in the current moment. For director Risto Jarva and the writing team of Jarva-von Bagh-Pakkasvirta, the central themes are the difficulties of knowledge, awareness, and communication; von Bagh characterized the film in retrospect as an anthology of the communication and power discourse of the 1960s.
A researcher for the Institute of History (Arto Tuominen) is making a TV documentary in the year 2012 about a model who died on set in 1976. In his current time, he finds a doppelganger of the woman (Ritva Vepsä), but all is not what is seems to be. Not even the brave new society is as free of contradiction as the Institute of History would like to believe and tell you to believe; this is made clear by the leader of the strike (Kalle Holmberg). The film’s Space Age fashion is attention-grabbing, and Otto Donner’s song Pääskytorni (Swallow Blind) has become a classic of Finnish film music.
The film, which is set in the future, was, in a way, made for the future. The critical response at the time was varied, as the film received both praise and bad reviews, and financial failure was guaranteed. At the time of the writing of this text, Deaf Crocodile Productions is about to release a 4K restoration of the film. We are living in a time of roses. (V-MH)