The Last Wedding

An orange Volvo drives along a small gravel road. It passes a sweaty and exhausted man who pushes a stone along in front of him. The man stops and gives the car a resigned or even accusatory look as it passes by. In the car is a couple returning from Sweden, Pekka and Meeri, with their daughter Jaana. The man appears throughout the film, endlessly rolling the stone in front of him like Sisyphus. ''Our lives have never meant anything but pointless work, an endless repetition of movements without purpose or meaning''. These are the words spoken to Pekka by one of the old people in the village, and this is also one of the recurrent themes in the film; what is really important? We get to follow Pekka and Meeri during the time they spend in the village. Pekka feels like returning to his roots; he wants to stay. Meeri on the other hand looks upon the village with growing disdain; this is a life that belongs to the past. This warm and nostalgic comedy takes a look at people in rural surroundings, and its main features are the odd characters and the subtly philosophical dialogue. The tone is easy-going and happy but with a touch of black humor which occasionally turn into cynicism. Typical for The Last Wedding is also the way in which the film pokes fun at stereotypes. A recurrent narrative device is the ironical distance which appears when the characters themselves make fun of ''the splendidness of hating progress and the preservation of a true Finnish identity''. Through this device the film not only creates a distance to itself, it also creates a way of questioning the idea of a national identity and beliefs connected to nationality. In the middle of all this is a burlesque view of Sweden and the Swedes; an image of the Swede as a callous and rational representative for a cynical and technocratic surrounding world. There are many analogies to Agneta Fagerstrom-Olson's film Kärlekens himmelska helvete (1993), particularly when considering the characters and the sympathetic warmth with which they are presented. However, maybe the affinity with Matti Kassila's awardwinning Ihmiselon ihanuusja kurjuus (1988) is even more obvious. Polonen has managed to capture people's disappointments and shortcomings during this melancholical era as effectively as Kassila. In The Last Wedding Polonen has managed this by adding a large portion of humor to the film's melancholy and fateful aura. RL

Premiärstatus
Svensk premiär: Orig. titel
Kivenpyörittäjän kylä: Medverkande
Martti Suosalo, Henrika Andersson, Matti Varjo: Producent
Kari Sara: Manus
Markku Pölönen, based on the novel by Heikki Turunen: Foto
Kari Sohlberg: Musik
Vesa Mäkinen: Talat språk
Finnish