If You Love - ponderings on musical drama

Yesterday I bought a DVD copy of Neil Hardwick's musical "If You Love". A friend of mine, with whom I shared formative years at Birch Village, where a great part of the film was cast, recommended the film to me. I didn't remember to go and see it at the movies. Now it entered my life at the point when I am writing my own multicultural drama. Glad I saw it, glad to have shared it with a local of that landscape- but I also have some critical comments to make:

1. Starting from the obvious: the film openly criticizes, in my opinion in a classical leftist way, the contemporary polarisation of class divides in Finnish society, and plays on old leftist classics, such as the key tune "If You Love". It really tries to make some political points, but fails to convince anyone, when you read from the cover that it's been sponsored by Hesburger, Oriflame, National Lottery etc. The presence of the sponsors in the film was too obvious, leaving the viewer with very little imagination to fill the gaps.

2. I felt empowered by the way Hardwick sees Birch Village. His way of playing with the locality was one of the strongest points of the film. I believe it's a continuing prose poem to a landscape that rarely gets positive attention in the media. I used to live for two years in one of the monstrous towers the film portrays (the red student house, not the Blue Gazebo), but as the scenes have been filmed on sunny summer days, they really don't bring the worst out of the "hoods". There's a lot of light and hope in the imageries. If compared to some other recent films and TV series depicting Finnish suburban life (Jari Tervo's Mogadishu Avenue, Johanna Vuoksenmaa's Nousukausi), this film doesn't exoticize the "hoods" or make them look more miserable than they are in real life. Hardwick actually humanizes Birch Village. But upon doing this, I believe he uses very conventional methods that point out towards middle-class tastes and values. There is an artsy red-haired auntie living in the Blue Gazebo of Birch Village, but when the film shows her apartment from the inside, it looks rather like a posh loft apartment in Eira. In real life, Birch Village apartments do have grey plastic floors and worn-out beige cupboards. I would have preferred to see a bit more of the council house aesthetics in the film. (The African restaurant scene was, on the other hand, the most beautiful scene in the whole film, and the only passage where I truly enjoyed the stylicization. I would love all our suburbs to have restaurants like that!)

3. A lot of the dancing was just crap. No need to explain this any further.

4. The history of Finnish pop/rock music appeals to Finnish audiences, but very little to the "Mamus" who have not lived here long enough to witness that history. Because the film has a strong multicultural theme, I would have wanted the film to show more of the multicultural realities of the people. In this case, it would have required some further studies on Nigerian aesthetics. If the people in the film have real Nigerian names, then there should have been more cultural details. The love couple's meeting remains now a bit shallow. In real life, people discuss the cultural differences in vivid details, and these discussions can be empowering.

5. I also felt that there were too many songs, introduced in a chaotic and haphazard manner. My favorite musical scene was Afia's performance of Eppu Normaali's "Joka päivä ja joka ikinen yö" on a typical Birch Village playground. That scene spoke to me deeply. It showed the possibilities of hybridity, performed in a creative manner. A lot of the other music and dance acts left me cold.

6. There is a big difference between commercial films and artsy films. Kaurismäki films mainly employ character actors, who may not be the prettiest and sleekest in physical appearance. "If you love" employed many kinds of actors, some of whom shone out with their outstanding personality (for instance, Mervi the single mother nurse), but others were cast only on the basis of good looks (Ada, the main character). The migrant actors definitely beat many of the Finnish ones. Ada and her blonde friends were a great disappointment. Tony (Chike Ohanwe) was promising in his debut in the film world, and I would love to see him in a completely different role in the future. Romantic Romeo role is not the ideal role for him. He is too talented to play that kind of role.He would do better in a more ironic role.

7. I would like to know how much Hardwick has been watching Bollywood films as of late, and how much of that tradition he thinks he has introduced to the Finnish cast. I see a very strong Bollywood component in the film, and cannot compare it with any other experiences of watching (European) musicals. But then, in Bollywood there's a certain degree of professionalism, which was absent in this film. I was very puzzled about the genre, and cannot yet say if the puzzlement is positive or negative. 

Abi Morgan's "The White Girl": the politics of looking back

Last Tuesday the Finnish YLE1 showed the prize-winning and according to some sources "controversial" TV drama, "The White Girl", written by Abi Morgan. The film took us directly to the Pakistani quarters of Bradford, where a white working class single parent family had been emergency housed after a violent marriage. It is a story of ethnic separatism, and of white "outsiders" who are no longer privileged in the eyes of the migrant community.

The film has been received with wildly mixed feelings. Morgan has been accused of political correctivism, social pornography, or a tendency to show the white working class life as more scum than it could possibly ever be, anywhere in Britain or even Europe. It does not transcend the class divide, her critics claim.

I don't read the film first and foremost as a commentary about the British working class in peril, but for me it worked as a powerful reminder of the politics of looking, the politics of gaze, and counter-gaze. In the film, the white family's eldest daughter Leah approaches Islam, and finds comfort in daily prayers, while her mother is focusing on destroying herself through alcohol, drugs and a violent on-and-off relationship with her ex. The film shows clearly the rationality of a person's search for spirituality in a turbulent life situation. It could be any religion, but in this case it is Islam. Leah's choice to start imitating the daily acts of her classmates and neighbours has not been exoticized, but it is shown as the most likely and most intelligent choice a minority child can do. I understand that in the UK there are several Muslim-majority public schools, in which the curriculum has been Islamicized in the way Morgan portrays. In such a school, a white girl is an exotic bird.

It is true that Islam in the film is idealized, and shown in the most poetic, aesthetic form. All the Muslims in the film were sympathetic characters. Not all adult whites were bad, but morally ambivalent and weak in willpower. Very cleverly, Leah's mother was portrayed, amongst all other deviant characteristics, as illiterate (shaking the myth of the illiterate Muslim housewife). And the film's aesthetics bordered on ghettoization and third worldization. It showed the everyday life of a part of Britain that has for long been underprivileged and at the same time contains many other worlds.

To the film's critics I would like to pose a counter-question: if the film's perspective was so upsetting or irritating, isn't that a sign of something happening in the minds of the viewer? And isn't that what filmmakers are supposed to do, to choose a point of view and stick to it? I at least enjoyed to travel with Leah into the local mosque and experience with her the first steps of practicing a new faith. I enjoyed the acting, the dialogues, the dramaturgy, and the details of the settings, and the camera technique. I have never been to Bradford, and have not quite seen similar "third-worldization" of European housing areas in my own eyes. I have for many years wanted to travel to Bradford. Now this film caused in me a strong impulse to fulfill this idea.

But even more importantly, the film succeeds in showing, not only through the white family members' perspective, but also from the perspective of the local Muslim community, what the white working class neighbours' life might look like. In Finland, all the so called multicultural novels and films focus on the migrant experience as minority experience, and the emphasis is on how to integrate in the clean, punctual and orderly Nordic society. This film does something else, it turns around all the questions and shows us the possible future faces of Europe. I have rarely seen a film that manages to condense a social and political conjuncture, a turning point, a knot of signs in such a powerful package.

Lähiövalaat/Suburban whales

Tehdessäni eilen etnografisia nettiseikkailuja eräälle tunnetulle maahanmuuttajakriittiselle foorumille, ja myös kestosuosikkini Johanna Tukiaisen blogiin, opin kiinnostavan uuden käsitteen, jonka olen ajatellut ottaa käyttööni: LÄHIÖVALAS. Termin synonyymi on TUULIPUKUVALAS, mutta mielestäni siinä on liikaa kirjaimia. Termi viittaa ylipainoiseen yksinhuoltajaan, jolla mahdollisesti on lapsia useammalle maahanmuuttajataustaiselle miehelle ja joka on luopunut ulkonäkönsä tuunaamisesta. Kolmas herkullinen sukulaistermi on SIDUKKAMURSU.

Koska lähiövalaat harvoin vikittelevät poliitikkoja, heistä on vaikea löytää kuvallista todisteaineistoa. Kaarina Hazard on saanut äskettäin kantaa kunnianimeä dissattuaan edesmennyttä Tony Halmetta. Mutta Kaarinan tapauksessa nimitys osuu vain häneen fyysisesti - ei suosittu mediakriitikko ja näyttelijä voi oikeasti olla lähiövalas, hänellä on siihen liian monta fania. Etsisin termin genealogiaa suomalaisesta viihdemaailmasta laajemmin. Eija Vilppaan esittämä Pirre teki tuulipuvusta suurta taidetta 80-luvulla, ja ohjelman nimikin on kuvaavasti Fakta Homma (vrt. Hommafoorum). Valitettavasti Pirren mies oli perussuomalaisen prototyyppi, ja hänen ruumiinmuotonsa on liian anorektinen, mutta Pirren asenne kelpaa.

While making ethnographic excursions yesterday to a well-known "migration-critical" internet forum, and also to my long-term favourite bloggist Johanna Tukiainen's diary, I learn an interesting new concept worth using and manipulating: SUBURBAN WHALE. The synonym is WINDSUIT WHALE, but I find the Finnish variant of it has too many letters. It refers to an overweight single mom, who possibly has children fathered by several men of migration background, and who has given up tuning her looks. A third delicious near-synonym is CIDER WALRUS.

Because suburban whales in this country rarely make passes at politicians, it is difficult to find pictorial evidence of their existence. Kaarina Hazard, a media critic and actor, who recently publicly insulted the dead extreme right politician Tony Halme, was given the badge of honor, but the term only describes her physically. Kaarina is far too popular and intellectual to embody the character. I would start looking for her in the genealogy of Finnish entertainment world more widely. The character Pirre (middle in the picture above) performed by Eija Vilpas, transformed windsuits into a work of art in the 1980s, and even the comedy show's name suits well the context of this decade. Fakta Homma and Hommafoorum (the extreme right site) play well together. Unfortunately in the series Pirre was married to a prototype of a basic Finn (image: seated on the right), and her body mass index was too anorectic. However, her attitude is perfect, telling a tale.

Beyond ethnicity: the future of the immigrant novel?

I’m trying to make up my mind about a novel that has got raving reviews in the Swedish press and is about to be translated into Finnish, a novel that most Finns can easily relate to, perhaps easier than many middle-class Swedes, that is Susanna Alakoski’s debut novel Svinalängorna (2006).

Finnish emigration to Sweden in the 1960s and 1970s was a mass phenomenon that can in the European context be related to the Irish emigration to the UK: the promise of a better-paid jobs and fast attempts at integration as a white almost invisible minority that nearly “passes”. Almost all Finnish families have some relatives living in Sweden. Since the 1990s it has become popular to write, make films about and discuss the memories of the WW2 children who were sent to Sweden to be protected from bombings. Surprisingly little fiction has come out of the later, purely economically based collective historical experience.

The Finns are the largest ethnic minority in Sweden, but their degree of integration in mainstream Swedish society does not make the theme automatically appealing, or media-sexy. The recent “immigrant novels” in the Swedish language have been written by authors of the visible minorities, for instance Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s Ett Öga Rött (2004) is a strikingly post-colonial portrait of the Arab experience in the Stockholm area with a similar kind of cross-generational emphasis. Both authors enjoy play with immigrant Swedish; Khemiri perhaps more strikingly and innovatively than Alakoski who only restricts immigrant patois to one character, the children’s father.

The name Svinalängorna literally means “pigsties”, the rows of sub-standard communal housing. The novel is based in Ystad, the southern tip of Sweden, a sleepy provincial town with a small population of immigrants – an idyllic location that people would not automatically relate with social misery. The house where the protagonist Leena and her family are allocated in the early 1970s first seems like a paradise for all of them, coming straight from the boat. The flat is brand new, has running water, proper bathrooms, and a fridge.

The paradisical conditions soon deteriorate, and the newly arrived parents face the small-town Swedish narrow-mindedness: the neighbours detest their growing of sunflowers in the communal yard, and the whole mode of living is based on litanies of petty rules. In many ways Leena’s parents still have some kind of village mentality based on spontaneity, whereas the local Swedes prefer the quiet privacy and order.

The cultural differences Alakoski describes are however subtle, and one should also be aware of the regional differences inside Sweden (the South of Sweden being more conservative and affluent than the areas north of Stockholm). In other words, the novel describes settling down in a part of Sweden where encounters with immigrants were not in the 1970s yet a part of the everyday experience of the locals. This makes the reading also more challenging in Finland, as Finns are more used to imagining immigrant life in the big cities, Stockholm and Göteborg. In many ways, the novel is not about traumatic ethnic discrimination, but rather about class and linguistic differences.

Portraying Finnish ethnicity in Sweden is a tough job that easily draws on fixed stereotypes on “the national culture”. Alakoski uses them in obvious ways, highlighting the Finns’ bent on alcoholism, sports and schlager. Perhaps her own memories of being a Finn in Sweden relate just to these three factors, but in the portrayal of the newly arrived immigrant couple, I would have appreciated more nuances that are atypical. Leena’s father has a children’s home background, which the whole family uses as an explanation to why he gets very little done; her mother, during her dry periods, enjoys reading and political debates with friends.

The parents’ personal histories are however often swept away by “Finnfests”, the fanatic watching of Olympic games or the drunken brawl in the rhythm of melancholic tango. These may indeed be the most typical aspects of Finnish collective experiences as a minority in Sweden (understood from the perspective of cultural studies as a slogan by Raymond Williams: “culture is ordinary”), but a Finnish reader, living on the other shore of the Baltic Sea, may wish to object: reading about the most common, which often accentuates in a new country, becomes tedious in the long run. How simplistic can nostalgia get? We’ve seen this so many times we are expecting some off-paths, some other interests than national interests from the characters, too. Often such things happen in the context of immigration: newly arrived immigrants have honeymoon periods with the new culture, they attend courses, become active in the community, acquire new hobbies, tastes of food, even new manners. For instance, in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), the Bangladeshi protagonist, tied up in her East End apartment, eventually learns how to skate - an unlikely hobby for a middle-aged Muslim woman, and a sign of personal liberation.

In Svinalängorna, the parents’ honeymoon is restricted to short-term enthusiasm about the new apartment; very quickly they fall into the trap of negative thinking: “it is not worth trying, there is no point”-type of despair. The father gets a community-sponsored low-pay job at a metal workshop, from which he is absent during his drinking periods, the mother stays at home with the three children and receives handouts from the local charities. The children are fully clothed by a second-hand clothes bank run by the City Hall, and the social workers do their best to provide for the growing kids’ hobbies. This type of letting go is not typical of Finnish immigrants living in Sweden, many of who have good education and steady jobs.

As a novel, a piece of fiction, one should not expect Svinalängorna to portray more than one family’s story. Alakoski has chosen to narrate a story about marginality and dependence on the welfare state, and her understanding of class differences not only between the immigrants and the Swedes but also between the Swedish working class and the middle classes is her definite stronghold. Crudely put, she makes a better job of class than Finnishness, and the class job is so well done that it should receive also international attention. Particularly the portrayal of the single mother living in Leena’s neighbour, Inga-Lill, and her attempts to upgrade her social status by dating a man who is in a managerial position and owns a boat, is tragically amusing.

Alakoski also understands intimately the psychological processes that take place in a family whose parents are alcoholics; the perspective of the school-age daughter who hurries home from school to see if the parents are still alive, is highly plausible and gripping. In Finland, this genre of literature (childhood traumas on parents’ alcoholism) is of course highly developed, and Svinalängorna could be well compared with the local author Kreetta Onkeli’s Ilonen talo (1996), with whom the novel acquires a peculiar sympathy of souls. Another, less likely comparison could be the Irish-American Frank McCourt’s Angela's Ashes (1996), in which poverty is at another level than in social democratic Sweden but the child’s experience of neglect and despair very similar.

Much of the narration is tragic to the extent of being pitch-black; however, Alakoski saves the novel by creating a truly hopeful ending, which emphasizes children’s free zones of imagination and space for individual growth, even in less stable family conditions. I had many objections to the text, a litany of grumblings, which in the end turned out to be a more fruitful reading experience than reading a novel with which one agrees totally and reads in a day’s sweep.

Svinalängorna was not a page-turner but a long process, filled with mixed emotions, critical questions and comments. It was a learning process that ended in a question that I also as a writer on multiculturalism and immigrants’ experience in Finland daily ask from myself: what is the future of the so-called immigrant novel, and what is the responsibility of the author in imagining alternative, less likely, but yet possible, futures?