Critique | Maria Ruotsala

EXCERPTS FROM THE CRITICS OF MARIA RUOTSALA’S FILMS:

Hyper Sensitive (42 min)

- Eventually! Let the fanfares play! Finnish cinema is saved! The reason is a great film written and directed by Maria Ruotsala.

Turun Sanomat, Kari Salminen

- Maria Ruotsala is one of the most talented Finnish filmmaker.

Helsingin Sanomat, Kristiina Markkanen

- Hyper Sensitive is an ambitious film. The images remain in the mind to rotate in a strange way.
- There is nothing Finnish in the view of the world as well as in the visual narration. The references would rather be to Joseph Losey and Alain Resnais.

Helsingin Sanomat, Mikael Fränti

- The new grandiose film is Hyper Sensitive, directed by Maria Ruotsala. It contains a dense and philosophically ambitious research about the difficulty of loving.
- Stylish cinematography brings in to mind throwbacks from Godard and the New Wave. The narration balances deliciously on the border of realism and surrealism.
- Ruotsala uses bold symbolism, even breaking down the unity of time and place. Surprisingly, the effect is not hollow or artificial. Instead, the solutions retain their significance and increase the power of her expression. The suspense grows out of relationships between people, upheld by a continuous conceptual motion, a feeling of not watching anything pre- digested but something that will continue to live in your mind. Kainuun Sanomat, Pekka Huolman

Rosegarden (50 min)

- Maria Ruotsala has again proved that she is one of the brightest hopes of Finnish cinema. Rosegarden is not a conventional narration. It is a very special one. The result is a direct hit.

Turun Sanomat, Kari Salminen

- Rosegarden introduces a talented and original filmmaker.
- The biggest miracle is that the film does not contain any unnecessary details even though it straggles. All is essential and presented in appropriate size. The story is full-bodied.

Ilta-Sanomat, Matti Linnavuori

Happy Home (3 X 60 min)

- Happy Home will remain in the history of Finnish television drama.
- Maria Ruotsala’s grip is of instinctive sensitivity and expressive power. Central Ostrobothnia, Hannu Björkbacka - This TV series is a rare gem in the domestic drama production.

HBL, Malin Slotte

- Happy Home is the high point of the year. The series ended two weeks ago but the harrowing drama is still alive in my mind.

Helsinki News, Mikael Fränti

Apeiron (90 min)

- In recent years, Apeiron is the most complete, the most beautiful and the most challenging Art house film in Finland.

Filmihullu, Lauri Timonen

- As a science fiction about good and evil, Maria Ruotsala’s Apeiron is an original and visually impressive version of Leena Krohn’s ”impossible to film” novel Umbra. The adaptation detaches itself from the original work and takes off into another direction. Krohn’s accurate expression receives an equally thought-out cinematic counterpart. What suddenly becomes visible in the sci-fi is the inner space of the mind – in the spirit of Kubrick, Tarkovsky and Lynch, but also Pasolini, Buñuel and Malick.”
- As an art film, Apeiron surpasses the clichés of realism and genre by the freedom of surrealism and avant-garde. It has been made with love and not money, with thought and not effects, but it still fulfils the requirements of science fiction. The result is fabulous. Sodankylä Midsummer Festival Catalogue 2014

- The problems of filmmakers of small nations are often shared regardless of region: low visibility at home or abroad, and the pressure to adopt aesthetics and borrow elements from either Hollywood, feel-good American indies, or a kind of inoffensive mishmash of Ousmane Sembène and Walter Salles (usually funded by the French government). Thankfully, *Apeiron *from Finnish visual artist Maria Ruotsala avoids all of these habits in making its gutsy philosophical and aesthetic statement.
- Dissecting emotional states rather than dramatizing them, *Apeiron *is a challenge to watch, but a welcome one, anchored by fantastic performances from Sampo Sarkola and Irina Björklund.

Film Comment by Violet Lucca

-Science fiction is not one of the mainstays of Finnish cinema. My favourite of the earlier films is Maria Ruotsala's Apeiron (2013).

9/ 2022 Antti Alanen “Film diary” .

Apeiron

Hannu Björkbacka, above (fragments of his critic in Keski-Pohjanmaa of “Apeiron”)
(He gave five stars)

-Is one allowed to refuse to entertain? Can a Finnish filmmaker surprise
with a leap into the unknown and bring back something that used to be
called cinematic art? Does one have a permission to take a risk and leave
the alleged audience expectations unanswered?

-I would believe it if it would be revealed that after the TV classic Ilonen
talo (2006) director-scriptwriter Maria Ruotsala has for seven years just
been working on Apeiron. The film is so complete, minutely thought out,
visually rich, and bold in content.

-Kubrick’s adaptation of A Clockwork Orange serves as a reference of the
way Apeiron visualises the world Krohn had created into the language of
cinema. Ruotsala has invented new characters into it, Umbra’s wife Iris
(Irina Björklund) as the most important one. The script prunes and
condenses the material successfully, combining the characters and
shaping the themes while respecting Krohn’s ideas.

-Aperiron is an exemplary adaptation of a novel. It has the courage to tear
itself away from the original work and embark on its distinctive paths.

-Towards the end, the sequence of the book’s events changes. The theatre
scene, painful for both Umbra and the viewer, is like a distressing scene
removed from Buñuel’s The Age of Gold or Pasolini’s Saló. Fortnately the
very last shot “opens up into infinity” as beautiful, liberating, even
consoling. And quite literally, respecting Krohn’s spirit.

-The visions of Apeiron bring to mind besides Lynch’s Eraserhead and
Cocteau’s Orpheus also Malick’s The Tree of Life. Fortunately the Finnish
definition and explanation of the world is of a less rambling sort. Apeiron
even succeeds in where its kindered spirit Cloud Atlas failed.

I was sold after the first images. While we rush, hundreds of thousands
strong, into cinemas to watch Finnish films, one of the year’s finest films
premieres on the TV.

Film Diary BY ANTTI ALANEN :

Hannu Björkbacka (Sodankylä 2014 Festival Catalogue): "As a science fiction about good and evil, Maria Ruotsala’s Apeiron is an original and visually impressive version of Leena Krohn’s ”impossible to film” novel Umbra – silmäys paradoksien arkistoon."

"In a closed facility for dangerous cases, a researcher couple called Umbra and Iris (Sampo Sarkola, Irina Björklund) are monitoring their patients. Umbra is transforming into someone like his inmates. He does not want the child that Iris is about to have. Iris responds to this cynicism with the hope of new life. That is what she wants to offer also a self-destructive woman called Lucy (Eeva Muilu)."

"The adaptation detaches itself from the original work and takes off into another direction. Krohn’s accurate expression receives an equally thought out cinematic counterpart. What suddenly becomes visible in the sci-fi is the inner space of the mind – in the spirit of Kubrick, Tarkovsky and Lynch, but also Pasolini, Buñuel and Malick."

"As an art film, Apeiron surpasses the clichés of realism and genre by the freedom of surrealism and avant-garde. It has been made with love and not money, with thought and not effects, but it still fulfils the requirements of science fiction. The result is fabulous."

"Miika Hyytiäinen has composed the score which is full of rich elements. Among them, Daniel Schultz with his bright soprano rises above the rest." (Hannu Björkbacka, Sodankylä 2014 Festival Catalogue)

Maria Ruotsala, one of the most prominent Finnish contemporary artists, has been interested in the cinema for a long time and studied it professionally. Apeiron, inspired by a novel by Leena Krohn, is her first feature film.

Apeiron is image-driven, and a strong and original approach emerges in it. Impossible to classify, I was thinking about affinities with Expressionists and Surrealists, the nightmares in The Hour of the Wolf, the visit to the gallery in Vertigo. For a while I thought that it is futile and impossible to imitate Tarkovsky, but the film gets stronger towards the end: the images get more compelling and original.

Made on a very low budget, the financing came from Finland's Swedish-speaking television, and Swedish is not the mother's tongue for the director or the male lead. It is a distancing factor. Although screened on 2K DCP, the film often looks like it has been shot in low definition. Despite these limitations Apeiron is compelling.

It is a dystopian vision. The main location is an asylum for dangerous mental patients, and the leading couple are doctors there. We embark on a journey into madness, also into new kinds of madness. The work follows the doctors to their home, but "jag vill inte höra djävulens röst här hemma", "I don't want to hear the devil's voice here at home", states Irina to Sampo.

There is a woman who has become a circle (evoking la Grande Hystérie of the Salpêtrière days of Charcot, recently covered by Alice Vinocour in Augustine). There is a space traveller who has lost his mind and become a deranged violent criminal. The novel and the film are meditations about existence on our way to a Weltanschauung informed by quantum physics. They are meditations of "en större, ogripbar ordning", "a bigger, unfathomable order". The meaninglessness, the emptiness. On the journey to space nothing unexpected happened. "Where were you really?" There were no contures, no form. Where were you? Where you belong, on the other side of the big bang, on the arrow of time, in the wind of time.

During the last half an hour there are unforgettable visions: - "The woman without a face" (her face impressively disfigured, not quite an Elephant Woman). - The parallel woman to Irina Björklund. "I am the other woman whom you left alone in the night". - The boy beyond the mirror. - The visit to the gallery, to see the Adoration of the Magi by Giotto. - Sampo Sarkola trading places with an asylum inmate. - A theatre performances with a real rape about to be enacted in the presence of the woman's mother and brother. The auditorium turns into a lynch mob.

There is a cosmic sense with recurrent images of the sky, the space, the ocean. The sky is the ceiling in the final theatre sequence.

The music and the sound are impressive.

I look forward to seeing Apeiron again, and I look forward to more films from Maria Ruotsala.

Filmihullu 1 / 14 by Lauri Timonen

-It must also be symptomatic that the most complete, beautiful,
challenging, and efficacious art film Apeiron, directed by Maria Ruotsala
and based on the novel Umbra by Leena Krohn, was completely left
without theatrical distribution in Finland and was premiered directly on
television. This is the kind of film we should be sending to international
film festivals instead of flavourless mechanical dramas calculated with
plastic abaci.

Happy Home

Rosegarden

Hyper Sensitive