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Bookmark this pageJuha (1999)
Director: Aki Kaurismäki
Movie review
From Time Out Film Guide
Based on a much-filmed Finnish novel from 1911: a farmer's wife is seduced into running away from her stolid, older husband Juha by a city slicker, who enslaves her in a brothel. This plot is an ideal vehicle for Kaurismäki's riotous miserabilism - dour characters in dire situations - but for once the glum Finn goes beyond one-note comedy. He shoots it as a neo-silent movie and turns it into a sophisticated reflection on the evolution of silent cinema, from its heavily intertitled, melodramatic beginnings to the rarely equalled visual expressiveness of its maturity. (The soundtrack similarly evolves from a musical base, gradually adding sound effects and then a fragment of sync-sound as a woman sings.) The result curiously resembles parts of Twin Peaks, but it plays as an oblique indictment of the mediocrity of most modern cinema.Author: TR
Cast & crew
Director: Aki Kaurismäki
Producer: Aki Kaurismäki, Ilkka Mertsola
Cast: Sakari Kuosmanen, Kati Outinen, André Wilms, Esko Nikkari full cast
Genre(s): Comedy
Duration: 78 mins
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