THE SONG OF THE SCARLET FLOWER
via Teuvo Tulio, Aki Kaurismaki, & Peter von Bagh
You’ve liked something and then suddenly you lose interest.
You’ve plowed so much today.
You were made to wander.
You can’t shoot these rapids.
You take us--why don’t you rather keep us.
Now I know what it is to long.
Barry Alpert / Silver Spring, MD US / 1-7-09 (10:51 AM)
Written during my first viewing of this dazzling Finnish melodrama directed and edited by
Teuvo Tulio in 1938 and revived for screening outside Finland because of the efforts of
the leading contemporary Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki and the major Finnish film
historian and critic Peter von Bagh. I have to admit that I was wary of this film because
of the diction of the advance publicity [“wildly melodramatic”, “exaggerated metaphor
and feeling”], but once I granted this director his “donne”, I found that the numerous
films I had already witnessed by Aki Kaurismaki, not to mention Douglas Sirk and Rainer
Fassbinder, had prepared me for and allowed me to enjoy the excesses. I’m looking
forward to the remaining 3 films in the mini-retrospective at the National Gallery of Art.
|