Silent Trilogy
First screened and reviewed in October 2024
Director: Juho Kuosmanen. Cast: Aku-Petteri Pahkamaki, Jaana Paananen, Juha Hurma, Seppo Mattila. Screenplay: Juho Kuosmanen. VOR:④
A sprightly one-off by design and unlikely to make too many ripples, but imagine if more cinema were this inventive and tonally layered.
Juho Kuosmanen's triad of comic shorts, each rendered in the style of a barely post-Méliès silent, is even more delightful than I had predicted—equally spry and commanding as a technical exercise and as a laugh-out-loud riot from unexpected directions. Kuosmanen made Scrap-Mattila and the Beautiful Woman,the first of these shorts, in 2011-12 as an on-the-cheap morale booster for himself and his Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki crew when that debut feature was running into funding and production setbacks. Maybe that's why the mordant story of an aging man and a loyal pet whose house is summarily usurped by the government (broadly Up, but Finnish, and no longer than it needs to be) is silly and sly but also genuinely melancholic about the plight of someone cut off from his modest, dearest dreams.
The second, more farcical installment, called Moonshiners, is a loose remake of an actual Finnish silent, now lost, about a pair of illegal liquor sellers who have a costly run-in with a huckster of a different stripe. Moonshiners subs in an adorable piglet for the prior film's Palme-worthy dog, and also sneaks in one of cinema history's greatest "Fuck You"s at an unexpected juncture. The third chapter, Distant Planet, is as emotionally layered as the first but as funny as the second, as a recent widow tries to construct a spaceship that could reach the cosmic locale where she imagines her late husband now happily lives. While the first two tech-savvy pastiches brilliantly simulate the grain, grammar, lighting, stuttery rhythms, and practical effects of century-old movies, the final episode is a more patent blend of faux-antiquarian textures and more conspicuously digital sorcery. A darkish comic vision of the end of life and the end of the world, this third vignette also clearly mulls the ever more palpable end of cinema, borrowing elements of far-flung eras and idioms from across the medium's history to fondly eulogize the whole enterprise, but also to make the prospect of whatever comes next feel potentially ticklish and not just tragic.
I can't recommend this trio highly enough to the festival-type audiences who are by far the likeliest people to ever cross its path (ideally in a cinema, as was my privilege). The foley effects and orchestral scores, all recorded live on set, are delectable in themselves. Silent Trilogy shares with Matthew Rankin's Universal Language the same boisterous comic élan, the same commitment to a wildly eccentric sensibility, and the same pentimento of wistful sadness beneath their giggly surfaces. Both are at once valentines and epitaphs to cinema, but they refuse to get bogged down in pathos... and they work beautifully for audiences who may not have a genealogy of the cited film aesthetics at their fingertips but who know a clever jape or an uproarious image or a well-timed edit or a hilarious line of subtitled dialogue when they see one. Both films lean so far into "niche" that they wind up being counter-intuitively accessible and, more than that, refreshingly warm-hearted. Grade:A–
