Saturday, October 27, 2012

Korsoteoria / So It Goes

Finland | Suomi © 2012 ELO Helsinki Film School.
Fiction | 29 min | DCP | col.
Director: Antti Heikki Pesonen
Script: Antti Heikki Pesonen
Cinematography: Aarne Tapola
Sound: Toni Teivaala
Editing: Hanna Kuirinlahti
Music: Antti Pouta
Production: Aalto yliopisto / Tia Kalenius
Cast: Elli (Armi Toivanen), Santeri Mäntylä, Max Ovaska, Asko Sahlman [1955-2011], Juha Kukkonen, Sanna-Kaisa Palo
2K DCP released by Pohjola-Filmi with English subtitles by Kaisa Cullen. Viewed in the programme "Lähiöleffat: Korsoteoria ja Sirocco" [Suburban Movies: Korsoteoria and Sirocco] at Kinopalatsi 5, Helsinki, 27 Oct 2012 (premiere weekend).

The title of the movie means literally "Korso Theory", Korso being a suburb not far to the north from Helsinki.

Tampere Film Festival 2012: "So It Goes is a story about a working class woman called Elli who has never traveled outside of Finland. She will either get a cruise abroad or love. But not both."

AA: I watched Korsoteoria in Tampere Film Festival this year, but not attentively enough, and I was grateful for this chance to revisit it in normal commercial cinema programming - thanks to this rare recognition for a short film produced at the film school. I confess that the film is so desolate that I have a hard time relating to it. Elli is a thief and a robber with no redeeming features. The guy who is living with her is a drug addict. Elli plays for sucker the nerdy guy who is attracted to her. The boy is very badly hurt in the head in the robbery when Elli and her pal clean up his home, and he lands into the emergency room. Despair, deep and pure. Urban poetry: "olen umpijäässä talvella / kesällä täynnä sinilevää" ["in the winter I'm all frozen / in the summer full of blue alga"]. The boy draws a heart on the window pane with his own blood. Even the teacher has lost all hope, and upon his return from Estonia or Stockholm with a cargo of liquor he is stone drunk and hits the boy with his car, killing him. At the funeral Elli cries, maybe for the first time. "I never told him I was pregnant". - A central figure in modern Finnish cinema is the harridan, and Elli belongs to the most terrifying among them.

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