A Moment in the Reeds *** (2017, Janne Puustinen, Boodi Kabbani, Mika Melender) – Classic Movie Review 12,415

Janne Puustinen stars in the moving 2017 Finnish gay romance film A Moment in the Reeds as student Leevi, who returns to Finland from Paris to help his estranged father restore his lake house for sale, and meets his Syrian refugee helper Tareq.

Janne Puustinen stars in the moving 2017 Finnish gay romance film A Moment in the Reeds as gay literature student Leevi, who returns to his native Finland from university in Paris for the summer to help his estranged, conservative father restore the family countryside lake house for sale. Boodi Kabbani plays Syrian asylum seeker Tareq, a former architect by profession, hired by Leevi’s father Jouko (Mika Melender) to help with the work.

The father is forced to make trips back to town to tend to his ailing business, leaving the field open for the two young men to establish a powerful emotional and sexual bond. It turns out they are both gay, and both living in other countries seemingly to get away from their parents. Ironically, Finland is a home land for the foreigner and an alien land for the local. And, weirdly, this is going to turn out to be the crucial issue.

Leevi’s mom has died, which partly explains his dad’s gloom, and Tareq’s parents need to get away from Syria too if they can. There is mandatory military service in Finland, and Leevi hopes to avoid by obtaining French citizenship, disgusting the father, who thinks it would make a man of him.

The film is sweet and subtle, and then strong and sexy, and then wildly depressing. It seems the two young men are never going to be able to break free of their awful families, who don’t really care about them, just as they don’t really care about them either. When Leevi hits his hand with a hammer, his dad is only concerned that he might have damaged the plank of wood. Come to that, the dad is just a plank of wood. He’s homophobic and xenophobic, disgusted that Leevi isn’t more manly and that Tareq can’t speak Finnish and that they all have to communicate, if at all, in English. He is totally suspicious of what might be going on between the two young men, who have to act guiltily and furtively, impinging on a beautiful thing they start to have together.

It brings to mind the lines of the poem by the English poet Philip Larkin: ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.’ Are these two young men ever going to break the cycle? It doesn’t look like it.

The Finnish countryside is beautiful, idyllic, but nobody wants to live there any more. It’s the end. And the film’s end is spectacularly gloomy, a real downer. But this is a very good film, thoughtful and well written, truthful and real seeming, and very nicely, credibly performed by the three actors, improvising much of the dialogue. Finland looks alluringly lovely, at least for the summer holidays.

A Moment in the Reeds is written and directed by Mikko Mäkelä, a Finn from Lappeenranta, South Karelia, in his feature directorial debut. It is rare to have a feature-length Finnish film addressing gay relationships. Most of the film’s budget came from private financing, with a small part from crowd funding Indiegogo. Mäkelä said: ‘Production companies don’t take risks in countries this small.’

The film was shot in August 2016 and had its world premiere in the Love strand of the BFI London Film Festival on 6 October 2017. It went on to screen at film festivals around the world including Goteborg International Film Festival, Seattle International Film Festival and Frameline in San Francisco. Unusually for a Finnish film, most of the dialogue is in English, the two leading characters’ shared language. Mäkelä decided: ‘Casting gay actors for gay roles was the only option that made sense for me.’

The cast are Janne Puustinen as Leevi, Boodi Kabbani as Tareq, Mika Melender as Jouko, and Virpi Rautsiala as Pirjo.

Mäkelä said: ‘My main objective in making the film A Moment in the Reeds was to challenge Finland into acknowledging the diversity that exists within it.’

© Derek Winnert 2023 – Classic Movie Review 12,415

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