Premiere at the Midnight Sun Film Festival!
A timeless, stark, black-and-white landscape, ruthless to its inhabitant, sets the stage for the cosmic pain of separation. Right at the start, Mira Luoti’s sullen modern Dulcinea announces that she has found another man, and the jilted wanderer (Toni “Protoni” Järvinen) sinks into a blurry in-between zone that rings in the ears and bends the broken mind. He finds a shellfish-allergic contract killer as his companion/squire, and it soon becomes clear that righting past wrongs will essentially be about building a new stripper pole.
Musician-poet-photographer-writer Mr. Ylppö (b. 1973) honed his skills as the maker of dozens of music videos, and this lingeringly intense debut film represents the steady hand of the experienced director. Science fiction tones are combined with black humor, and the Wellesian/Gilliamian utopian melancholy of the protagonists wandering in rocky fields recalls the aimless wanderings of Don Quixote – dropped on an alien planet in a Lynchian night.
The screen reflects a variety of shapes: floating balls, broken tubes, masks, straps, stains, and a factory production line with its monotonous thud. The answers to the questions posed by the film take on a vague unspoken form, while the Antonionian desert exacerbates the friction of human relationships and violence lurks in the fragile structures.
This will be one of the most original and memorable films of the festival season: an experience that Aki Kaurismäki immediately described as a surrealist masterpiece.
Lauri Timonen