dar-11

The film might as well be a documentary, that's how accurate it is in its portrayal of the lives of a particular Finnish male type. In the region described (Southern Ostrobothnia) there still live hundreds of men like Antti and Jussi, and probably they will exist a thousand years from now. In the town where I was born there were two brothers who were known to engage in all sorts of criminal activity, but if they got caught, their grandfather (who was the son of an extremist right-wing leader of the 1930's) always bailed them out, paid the police to shut their mouths and the boys kept on plotting new crimes. When the grandfather died, one of the brothers was immediately sent to jail. The other one is free (not enough evidence). So the film is freakishly REAL. Now, this is not to say that all men are like that in Southern Ostrobothnia. They are a very small minority, and most people are a bit higher up in the evolutionary scale... Today, the general public regards the type of behaviour as in "Häjyt" as unacceptable and shameful. Still, the film is a handsome portrait of one particular group of Ostrobothnian people and their lives.