5 - Re-evaluating Crisis Politics in the Work of Aku Louhimies

Summary

Over the last two decades Aku Louhimies has established himself as one of Finland's most prominent and critically renowned auteurs. As well as achieving critical acclaim, Louhimies has built a reputation throughout his career for attracting and sustaining large domestic audiences. For example, on its opening weekend his 2017 film, Tuntematon sotilas (The Unknown Soldier, 2017), the third adaptation of Väinö Linna's celebrated Second World War novel, broke domestic box office records for a Finnish-language film. Louhimies also counts numerous other successful feature films, TV serials and music videos among his portfolio and, in recent years, he has made inroads internationally with the RTÉ-produced miniseries Rebellion(2016), based on the Irish War of Independence. His reputation for ‘quality drama’ has also followed him abroad where his work is consistently well-received on festival circuits across Europe and the United States. Despite the Nordic countries’ reputation for welfare-orientated egalitarianism, Louhimies's films frequently foreground economic and social inequality. In the two case studies explored here, Louhimies concentrates on exploring domestic and familial crises in the urban spaces of Helsinki, using these narratives to capture the state of Finnish society in a transitional age of neoliberal economic and political restructuring. In doing so, Louhimies appears to challenge the established perception of Nordic ‘continuity’, which is understood by historians and sociologists to be a key characteristic of Nordic nation-building rhetoric and one that has served to reinforce a sense of cohesive welfare egalitarianism. Instead, these films appear to disrupt such continuity by casting Finland's status as a pillar of utopian prosperity into doubt.

This chapter unpacks the thematic and ideological representations of crisis in Louhimies's feature films Paha maa (Frozen Land, 2005) and Vuosaari (Naked Harbour, 2012). Both explore contemporary life in Helsinki through a patchwork of interconnected and parallel narratives where the characters’ lives are marred and intertwined by domestic violence, alcoholism, unemployment and social alienation. However, despite the clear contrasts between dominant historical conceptualisations of social unity and the stark realities represented in these films, I argue that Louhimies appears to reappropriate the theme of continuity.