Customer Reviews

Frozen Land (English Subtitles)

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In many of the reviews it was compared with Pulp Fiction and it's won 17 awards internationally in various categories. That said, a few quibbles first. Paha Maa should translate as "The Bad Land" or "Badlands" rather than "Frozen Land" altho my Finnish may be a bit flawed here - still learning. Also, if you do not speak Finnish, you will miss about half of what is going on, as the subtitles are dreadful. Almost as bad as some Hong Kong movies <lol>

OK. Qibbles aside, lets move on to the Film. This is based on a Tolstoy story about agony being passed from one person to another but the end result is far from Tolstoy. Here it's symbolized by a false 500 euro note that gets passed on and on and on. There's a catastrophe one way or another for everyone who touches it. The story is about two friends - one of whom is computer geek and the other is a drug addict - son of an abusive father. The drug addict boy trades a Euro 500 note - printed by his friend - to buy back his music system, and in returns gets huge amoubt of change back to buy more drugs. The trading of the Euro 500 note continues through a series of bizarre events - from the shopkeeper to an auto mechanic cum robber - to a car dealer - to a vacuum cleaner salesman - to a prostitute - to a police officer - then to her family and children and - creates a chain reaction that lead even after 5 years of that first incident to a depressing last note.

Although the acting was excellent on the whole, I spent the whole movie waiting for the nasty boy who caused so much grief to so many of the characters get his final nemesis, and instead everyone else suffered except him and he gets the job of the husband whose wife's death he causes by running away from his friends, wins the girl he gave an overdose to and tried to rape. Unfortunately the butterfly effect completely fails to return to its cause.

A few other comments: There's a few explicit sex scenes, a lot of crime, sex, violence and drugs overall. Most of the actors in the film are in every second Finnish movie you'll see - the problems of mking films in a country with a small population I guess. The scriptings well done - Paavo Westerberg is a renowned scriptwriter in the Finnish movie scene and he's apparantly the best in what comes downn to describing the contemporary Finnish culture.

This movie seems to be many things to different people. Finns seem to have either loved it or hated it while foreigners seem to have generally enjoyed it - perhaps because its set in Finland and has a real Finnish outlook on life and it's a bit different to the usual Hollywood tripe. A common Finnish comment was that the director used all the Finish stereotypes as characters and mostly the worst stereotypes at that. Camera work is brilliant, script is OK, plot is so-so but the end is a bit depressing.

Should you wish to see a really good Finnish movie, then go for any of the Kaurismäki brothers' movies, who match talent and directorial skill with very good actresses and actors. Not this one.