Milka: A Film About Taboos

Milka is a teenage girl growing up in the Finnish countryside, probably somewhere in Lappland, probably in the 19th century. She lives with her mother and their handyman "Kristus Perkele", who is an ex-cossack and one hell of a worker. The story is dark and extremely slow-paced, and it involves a lot of nudity, praying and strange Lappish accent.

I recently watched the Polish adaptation of the same novel by Timo Mukka. This one is much less Catholic in the story and it made for a big difference in the concept of sin.

Having been raised in the Catholic tradition, I am quite aware of the rules of the game, especially what we were taught in regards to sins of the flesh.

This time around, instead of a local priest, the main player is a cantor at the village church where the residents do a lot of finger pointing at the suspected sinners.

A widowed mother and daughter are helped by a handyman with a well deserved reputation as a ladies man. He manages to get busy with both of them and it does not end well.

In the '70s, Rauni Mollberg's EARTH IS OUR SINFUL SONG was one of my favorite foreign films, and established the director as a major talent on the film festival circuit. I never got to see this amazing followup, MILKA (based on a work by the same novelist, Timo Mukka), till now, but it is worthy of major DVD exposure.

Unlike the Kaurismaki Bros. who followed, and double-handedly created a tongue-in-cheek (yet deadpan) Finnish film style for fans around the world, Mollberg was committed to a naturalistic approach. His films overflow with nature, life, lust, and an earthiness one finds in Scandi cinema mainly in the work of a more famous talent, the Swede Vilgot Sjoman of I AM CURIOUS (YELLOW) fame.

Both directors made a film with TABU in the title (or implied), and this Mollberg effort is quite effective in sidestepping yet fully treating the screen theme of incest. By making the adult character a father figure rather than a real, blood-related daddy, he applies the usual "it was merely the step-father" gimmick that is used countless times in American movies about incest, but works very well here.

That's because Matti Turunen as Kristus-Perkele (name translates as Christ/Devil) is really the common-law step dad to underage Milka, a beautiful (in offbeat fashion) young girl portrayed by one-shot Irma Huntus, who brings to the screen the sexiness that Bergman found in Harriet Andersson three decades earlier, in creating his first international successes SUMMER WITH MONIKA and SAWDUST AND TINSEL. I cannot imagine any other actress in the Milka role, and it is a shame that she did not pursue an acting career afterward.

Completing the strong front line is Leena Suomu, an Earth-Mother type who confines her acting to a narrow emotional range but proves to be solid as a rock in a crucial role.

Bookended by spectacularly beautiful shots of a birch wood in winter (virtually 100% black & white visually except for the color presence of Milka), film quickly develops its one-with-nature themes by the presence of a strange "clicking" (with beak) bird as talisman, and an early scene of Milka and the handyman (Turunen) frolicking naked in a lake. When they emerge, there is oh-so-natural sex play between 14-year-old Milka and the man, resulting in a tastefully shot intimacy and implied ejaculation, setting up trouble to come.

The religious aspects of this remote farming community are heavily stressed, and I especially enjoyed the motif of spiritual guidance from Cantor Malmstrom (quality, anti-stereotypical playing by Eikka Lehtonen), who instead of being rigid and cruel turns out to be caring once Milka's illegitimate baby is born. In between, she has a strong romance with Turunen, while the stud also continues servicing her mom and other women in the neighborhood. Again, it's all presented as utterly natural with the viewer in the position of watching an ethnographic exercise rather than a moralistic tale.

Also powerful is the technique of Milka frequently speaking directly to the camera (and viewer) in forceful monologues which bear the crisp sound recording (sounds of nature including rain being a constant motif) that makes MILKA an engrossing experience. I viewed the film without subtitles and have no knowledge of Finnish (or Lapp) but (recalling the best of Silent Era classics) the direction is strong enough to convey its dramatic content and themes in a way that transcends language.

Kudos to Mollberg and his talented cinematographers for a job well done -a work that remains in obscurity but is ripe for rediscovery.