Ruusujen Aika |
Finland • 1969 • 108m •
   • Directed by: Risto Jarva. • Starring: Arto Tuominen, Ritva Vepsä, Tarja Markus, Eero Keskitalo, Kalle Holmberg, Eila Pehkonen, Matti Lehtelä, Unto Salminen, Paavo Jännes, Aino Lehtimäki, Hilkka Kesti, Allan A. Pyykkö, Jukka Mannerkorpi. • Music by: Kaj Chydenius, Henrik Otto Donner.    In the year 2011, historian Raimo Lappalainen wants to illustrate how life was 50 years earlier. He becomes obsessed with the fate of a 1970s nude model, Saara Turunen, and finds a perfect actress to reconstruct her life and death in front of a TV camera. Meanwhile, a strike at a nuclear plant is covered up by the media.
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Review:
It is set in 2012, with an early recap and what's happened in the intervening years -namely the creation of a war-free stable world in which class distinctions and the ideological battles between Communism and Capitalism (or religious factions and tribal separations) have been eradicated. The future state is prosperous and based on a technocracy with contented populations sharing in nearly Utopian fashion.
The anti-hero Raimo is a civil servant, a scientist in the History Institute, who is smug, self-centered, and utterly convinced of his role as an objective historian. His seeming friends are quickly revealed to be plotting against him, to reveal his manipulative tactics and bring him down.
The ensnare him easily in a scheme whereby he is planning to tell, using documentary filmmaking as his mode (a nod to Jarva's profession) a story of an "ordinary person", in line with his almost mystical belief in the sociology of such folk. He becomes obsessed, not unlike the great Preminger movie "Laura", with a model turned actress named Saara who died while shooting a movie back in 1976. With is so-called friends' help, he discovers Kisse, an exact lookalike, still young, model who he enlists to play Saara in his re-creation movie. She is in league with the anti-Raimo buddies.
With an outstanding and eclectic original music score that deftly integrates avant-garde jazz into the mix (think late '60s pioneers like Pharoah Sanders and Andrew Hill), the movie establishes its futurism, now in the past of course 4 years after 2012, economically with simple costuming, believable technology and some nice cultural changes such as everyone into dancing with emphasis on hand movements (like Middle Eastern or Indian dancers, speaking via gesture). There is a modicum of nudity that has relegated this film unfairly to the "softcore exploitation" pigeon hole, even being released by Something Weird Video with English subtitles, a very odd bird in its catalog.
SPOILER ALERT:.
Review by lor_ from the Internet Movie Database.
Movie Database