The Earth is a Sinful Song (1973)

If it were not for the beautiful landscapes featuring in The Earth is a Sinful Song (dir. R Mollberg), I would probably not have been managed to sit through this film so revered in Finnish film history. Scarcely any stereotype about Finnish life is evaded. Excessive nudity: check. There is no end to people being killed: check. Hard drinkin': yep. Elusive nature: check. Saunas: check. Gloomy silence: c-h-e-c-k. Hard times, poor times: check. The story is set in Lapland during the late forties. A lively and independent girl falls for a reindeer cowboy, gets pregnant and well the relationship is not exactly a case of rosy bliss. Mollberg approaches this story with rough cinematograpy, amateur actors and plenty of haunting images of nature. Nautralistic scenes of animal slaughterings are coupled with just as naturalistic scenes of human encounters, often faltering or hard-boiled. The best parts of the film follow the daily life in the village, the social dramas accompanying the preparation of food, a troublesome calving process, or a visit by a frenzied (and scary) preacher. But usually Mollberg settles for the gruesome. The message is a simple one: life is tough as hell and people are mostly corrupt but life goes on and on and on in its basic flow of food, sex and chores. Life is squalor but there's also beauty. So why did I find this film hard to watch? I constantly felt that Mollberg was entirely preoccupied with etching an image, the image of this hard, unsavory life that other aspects of life were not at all detected. I also thought that the aesthetic expression of the film augmented this idea of life and that the naturalism used by Mollberg in this way became a sort of programmatic stance rather than working as an explorative and open-ended mode of looking at life.