#14 - JRL 7265
International Herald Tribune
July 25, 2003
film review
Kukushka -- Directed by Alexander Rogozhkin (Russia)

Reviewed by Dave Kehr NYT   NEW YORK ‘‘The Cuckoo’’ is set during a confusing period at the end of World War II, when the Nazi occupiers of Finland were in retreat from the advancing Russian Army. As the Nazis pulled out, they left behind many of the young Finns who had been pressed into service on the German side. This film, from Alexander Rogozhkin (‘‘Chekist,’’ 1992), tells the story of one of them: a beefy Finnish student named Veiko (Ville Haapasalo), who is dressed in an SS uniform, equipped with an ancient rifle and chained to a rock somewhere in Lapland with instructions to shoot as many Russians as possible before he is taken or starves to death. He is what the Russian soldiers call a cuckoo: a sniper on a suicide mission.

While Veiko is doing his best to free himself from his chains, — a process that involves using the lenses of his glasses to ignite the gunpowder he has emptied from his cartridges — he witnesses an aerial attack on a jeep transporting a Russian political officer and his prisoner, Ivan (Viktor Bychkov), a captain who has been cashiered for writing supposedly subversive poems. The officer is killed, and Ivan is freed, though severely wounded.

Ivan makes his way to the reindeer farm of a vivacious young Lapp, Anni (Anni-Kristiina Juuso), who has been trying to keep her primitive homestead together in the years since the war claimed her husband. As she is nursing Ivan back to health, Veiko, finally liberated, appears, touching off a three-way drama of sexual desire and political distrust that is further fueled by the inability of the three characters to understand one another.

There can’t be too many films with dialogue in Sami (the language of the Lapps), Finnish and Russian, but of course there are subtitles to reduce everything to simple English declarative sentences. This gives the viewer a decidedly unfair advantage over the characters: We can understand what they cannot, and are invited to laugh at their mutual incomprehension.

Under Anni’s motherly care — she is big on folk remedies involving mud patches and the beating of drums — the soldiers are nursed back to life, and something like a truce grows between them, though mutual suspicion remains in the background. Both men of course develop powerful attractions toward young Anni, but she — a proto-feminist of the far north — has her own ideas about whom she’ll be with and when.

Given a good shake, ‘‘The Cuckoo’’ produces the usual brotherhood-of-man, war-is-hell bromides, but it is far more interesting in the details of its execution than in its abstract message mongering. While doing pictorial justice to the spectacular landscape, Rogozhkin maintains a good sense of blood, dirt and sweat, human elements mingled together to keep the action rooted in some degree of reality.

Juuso, a nonprofessional chosen by Rogozhkin for her ability to speak the Lapp language, turns out to be a sly, minxlike creature with a wonderfully ironic, squaring-up look. She seems to need her two men like the proverbial fish needs a bicycle built for three, and She watches the sparring between the two men like a mother of two battling toddlers.