Umur (2002) Poster

(2002)

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9/10
touches heart and soul
ruben-heim28 November 2002
Set in front of the overwhelming landscape of northern Finland, somewhere near the Russian boarder. A soldier falls in love with a enigmatical beauty that comes and leaves as she wants. The seasons come and go, while he feeds on their short happy moments in the woods. She eludes and unravels herself, too.

The images Kai Lehtinen finds for his simple love story touch, they circle around the animation of the nature - seemingly - promising solitude (a good leitmotif, BTW). Bittersweetly filmed emotions, lucid faces, the Finnish sense of humor, silently melancholic; how hard is it to swim back into our sphere from that poetic dream!

This is made in a fashion, rarely anyone else than the Finnish can achieve. Not only a feast for the eye, but a meditation that touches heart and soul!
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8/10
Utterly Finnish and beautiful
paaskynen5 February 2006
Warning: Spoilers
This very Finnish film is about life, love and death with much of the atmosphere and background supplied by Finnish Lapland. The plot is simple: boy meets mysterious girl and they fall in love, as their roads cross several times. They get together, but the girl carries a secret to which the boy is blind, she is suffering from an incurable disease and the time they can spend together is limited by her more and more prolonged hospital visits till in the end she dies. The boy never understanding the reason behind the repeated rejections finds consolation in nature. In Hollywood this would have been a perfect recipe for a tearjerker, in Finland it makes for a subtly beautiful, melancholy and philosophical film that moves deeply, but not cheaply.
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