20/10/2010

Released last Friday by Sandrew Metronome on 81 screens, Dome Karukoski’s comedy road movie Lapland Odyssey went straight to number one, beating Despicable Me (UIP) and setting a new record for a domestic film.

With over 46,000 tickets sold, Karukoski’s fourth feature film had the strongest opening for a local film in 2010 and the fifth biggest opening for a local film in the last decade. A well deserved success for a director in tune with local audience’s tastes who voluntarily broke away from his usual youth dramas to tackle a serious topic –unemployment in Lapland- in an entertaining way.

Right from the outset, Karukoski sets the tone and displays his directing skills. Describing a tree in the middle of a field of snow, where for generations his ancestors have hung themselves, the narrator tells in a matter of fact but very comical way, why Lapland has such a high suicidal rate. The question of whether the narrator will follow the same path is left for the very end. Meanwhile, we are introduced to the main character, the laid-back couch potato Janne (Jussi Vatanen).

When his pretty girlfriend Irina (Pamela Tola) asks him to get his act together and threatens to leave him by the next morning if he doesn’t find a digital TV converter, his peaceful life is suddenly rocked. Flanked by two buddies (Jasper Pääkkönen and Kari Ketonen) he sets on a mission to travel a few hundred kilometers further north to get the magic ‘digibox’. The road trip on a December chilly night is full of adventures and enemies lurk in the dark: from water polo ‘killer’ lesbians to Russians billionaires who hunt them with paintball guns. The most serious enemy is Irina’s former boyfriend who tries to win her back while Janne is on his Northern odyssey. The challenge for Janne and his friends is mostly internal and they do come back as changed persons at the end of their picaresque road trip.

To find the right tone and make the story believable, Karukoski worked four years with scriptwriter Pekko Pesonen, who collaborated on his first film The Beauty and the Beast. The director told Cineuropa that is intention with the film was not only to deal with a serious subject matter in an entertaining way, but also to “explore the feeling of shame for Finnish men who cannot fulfill their ‘manly’ duties.

Shot mostly by night in a breathtaking fairy-like snowy landscape, the storyline is carried by a strong soundtrack from Irish composer Lance Hogan which mixes Irish and Finnish folk music with Ennio Morricone sounds, bringing in a Western dimension to the Northern epic. The film was produced by Helsinki Filmi in co-production with Sweden’s Anagram Film and Ireland’s Ripple World Pictures. Yellow Affair sold distribution rights to France’s DistriB Films following the film’s world premiere in Toronto.