During the winter in a small town in northern Finland, you might find yourself making plans to ask questions about human existence on a Saturday night. Or perhaps you’ll stay up in bed, giggling while reading a book by Sigmund Freud. Such is the surreal world of “The Woodcutter Story,” and right in the middle of it is Pepe (Jarkko Lahti), a man so relentlessly bright-sided that his constant, glass-is-half-full view of life can drive his friends and co-workers to anger. Smile and the whole world smiles with you, so the saying goes, but what happens when the world not only doesn’t smile back but actively thwarts your happiness? Making his directorial debut, Mikko Myllylahti decides to see what happens when he puts Pepe through the wringer. The result is a film that’s both strangely beautiful and just plain strange, accessible and alienating, and perhaps just like life, ultimately unknowable. But that latter quality isn’t something you always want in a feature film.
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By all outward evidence, Pepe has a comfortable, if uneventful, life. He works at a sawmill with his best friend Tuomas (HP Bjurkman), adores his son Little Tuomas (Iivo Turi) with whom he goes ice fishing every day, and he’s so well-liked at the local (and perhaps only) bar in town, that they celebrate his birthday with a no small amount of ceremony. But the surface of the facade is cracking, and bigger fissures in his life aren’t far away. His wife is indifferent to his meek advances (he gently pokes her in the belly) and seems to have let his birthday pass by unrecognized. One evening while playing cards, Pepe mysteriously bursts into tears unprompted. More directly, it’s announced that the sawmill has been sold and the new owners have decided to shut it down, effectively putting the entire town out of a job.
So begins a chain reaction of increasingly strange events, an almost Biblical series of occurrences that would even give Job pause. Pepe’s orderly and neat life starts to fall apart, as he’s beset by afflictions and disasters of almost every kind that would weaken the will of almost any normally functioning human. But not Pepe. “Everything will work out, we must not despair,” he maintains, while Tuomas, who on top of losing his job has discovered his wife is cheating on him, makes a grimmer assessment of things.
“…we’re being tossed around by the forces of fate. The life we’re living feels meaningful to us, but I’m afraid it’s an illusion. It’s terrifying to think that nothing matters,” he reflects existentially. Unbowed, Pepe can’t be taken by such talk, later stating that in life, “There’s always an option.” But at some point, you wonder how much he believes it, and how much he has to believe it.
Bearing the distinct fingerprints of fellow Finn Aki Kaurismaki in its carefully composed framing, production design, and deadly dry comic tone, Myllylahti plays the film’s out-of-time setting to his advantage. Set designer Milja Aho constructs Pepe’s world around the sheen of an idyllic era, with the kind of vintage cars and crockery that Brooklynites would go mad for at an upstate flea market. When cell phones and luxury cars make brief appearances, they’re an affront, a reminder that Pepe’s cutesy and picaresque bubble exists just outside the edge of a harsher world that’s elbowing its way into his life. Myllylahti draws us into Pepe’s cocoon, but before we’re too comfortable or too certain about anything we’re seeing, “The Woodcutter Story” starts upending expectations of what this picture is exactly all about.
Broken up somewhat arbitrarily and unnecessarily into two chapters, Myllylahti gradually unmoors his film from narrative and into metaphor. Eventually “The Woodcutter Story” finds itself in the backyard of David Lynch, with ominous characters, flaming cars, and even a glowing orb, tilting the film to such a degree in its last third to prod questions about what we’ve seen. Is Pepe in purgatory? Being drawn through Dante’s circles of hell? Have we witnessed a parable? Or has it all been a dream?
We may not have the answers, but we are guided by a stoic and commandingly composed performance by Lahti, who bears the suffering of his character with resolute dignity. Pepe is not to be pitied, but the film’s obfuscation of its ends ultimately keeps us at a remove from him. It’s a calculated choice as Myllyhahti clearly wishes to invite interpretation from his audience, but where does one start to sort out what Pepe’s downward spiral and his masochistic optimism all means? Maybe it’s all there in the first scene of the film, in which a mysterious businessman climbs a mountain and enters a cabin to effectively make a hostile takeover of the people of the valley below.
“I love this land, and these people. They’re good people who wouldn’t hurt anyone,” an equally mysterious woman pleads, deeply pained at having to sign the contract for this transaction.
“It will be horrible,” she predicts about what’s to come. A fact that even Pepe would eventually have to concur.
Perhaps Tuomas was right all along about one’s happiness being sustained on nothing more than the guise of control and meaning. If it’s truly Myllylahti’s view that satisfaction in life can’t be willed into existence, and that we’re at the mercy of the whims of whatever greater powers are bartering for our mortal souls, then “The Woodcutter Story” might be the most terrifying movie of the year. [C+]
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