In the Kalevala, the mother of young Lemminkäinen collects her son's bones from the black River of Death and tries to make them come back to life and tell their story. We are now facing a similar task. But the voice we give to the past—we must listen to it carefully.
If Antti-Jussi Annila's second film has one-tenth the grace, intelligence, and myth-potency of his first, then by all the gods I am watching Sauna (2008) as soon as I can pry the DVD from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
greygirlbeast's live, typing fingers, because Jade Warrior (2006) was amazing. Viking Zen found it on Netflix; she asked me if I wanted to watch a Finnish-Chinese martial arts epic and never having seen a Finnish-Chinese anything, I said yes. I didn't recognize the director's name. We were expecting it to be fun, perhaps an incongruous sort of Scandanavian wuxia. (You have to admit it's not really a stand-out title.) What the film turns out to be is an astonishing fusion of Chinese myth and the Kalevala, taking place in two languages and multiple layers of time, present-day Finland and China about four thousand years ago; it is about second chances and lost chances and the naming of demons and what it means to be a smith, and it contains some of the most striking passages I can remember from a recent film. There is a fight scene in which one of the participants is armed with a war fan and the other with a kantele. (It creates its own soundtrack.) Scenes at the protagonist's forge are as spark-filled and primal as Iron Man only hinted at. There is a genuine feel of the otherworldly and no way to tell from the mythic substrate whether the story will end in hope or tragedy or whether that question is even meaningful; it begins in fragments and puzzles itself together as it goes along, like archaeology, and when at last it is all locked seamlessly into place, the shape is not what you thought it was. Truly, I don't want to say too much. By now you should be able to tell whether you need to see this film, though if you're on my friendlist, I don't know why you wouldn't. But if nothing else, it is not a combination of mythologies I would have thought of: and it's done so beautifully, I am waiting now to see what else I haven't thought of, and need.
If Antti-Jussi Annila's second film has one-tenth the grace, intelligence, and myth-potency of his first, then by all the gods I am watching Sauna (2008) as soon as I can pry the DVD from
greygirlbeast's live, typing fingers, because Jade Warrior (2006) was amazing. Viking Zen found it on Netflix; she asked me if I wanted to watch a Finnish-Chinese martial arts epic and never having seen a Finnish-Chinese anything, I said yes. I didn't recognize the director's name. We were expecting it to be fun, perhaps an incongruous sort of Scandanavian wuxia. (You have to admit it's not really a stand-out title.) What the film turns out to be is an astonishing fusion of Chinese myth and the Kalevala, taking place in two languages and multiple layers of time, present-day Finland and China about four thousand years ago; it is about second chances and lost chances and the naming of demons and what it means to be a smith, and it contains some of the most striking passages I can remember from a recent film. There is a fight scene in which one of the participants is armed with a war fan and the other with a kantele. (It creates its own soundtrack.) Scenes at the protagonist's forge are as spark-filled and primal as Iron Man only hinted at. There is a genuine feel of the otherworldly and no way to tell from the mythic substrate whether the story will end in hope or tragedy or whether that question is even meaningful; it begins in fragments and puzzles itself together as it goes along, like archaeology, and when at last it is all locked seamlessly into place, the shape is not what you thought it was. Truly, I don't want to say too much. By now you should be able to tell whether you need to see this film, though if you're on my friendlist, I don't know why you wouldn't. But if nothing else, it is not a combination of mythologies I would have thought of: and it's done so beautifully, I am waiting now to see what else I haven't thought of, and need.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}