Lapland disease – Newspaper Kommersant No. 48 (7493) of 03/22/2023

The platform “Amediateka” shows the Finnish series “Northern Mafia” (Poromafia) by Mika Kurvinen. Mikhail Trofimenkov I am grateful to the authors of the snow-white noir for a virtual trip to Lapland, but he didn’t want to go there in reality.

The Northern Mafia has almost nothing that you would expect to find in a film about adventures at the junction of the Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish borders.

First of all, there is no tasty Scandinavian sense of hygge here – the simple and cozy happiness of sitting by the fire when the frost is at forty degrees behind the log walls. Even Oleshki, lazily plying between Finland and Norway, are uncomfortable, not like people.

Not only is there not a single indigenous Sami, but in general, not a single normal person who is not tied up with criminal secrets. Well, maybe a couple of tourists who were forced by members of the criminal family to pay twice the agreed price for a photo shoot with a deer. So they, having forked out, will disappear from the film and are unlikely to return to Lapland.

But only two families live in these blessed expanses, bleeding with hatred for each other. Such a disposition should cast an almost Shakespearean glow on the Lapland snow. There is almost Romeo and Juliet here – Sarah Poikipaa (Anna-Maya Tuokko) and Sameli Nelihanka (Samuli Edelman). Sameli ten years ago was convicted of murdering, though not his brother, but the father of his “Juliet”, and now he has returned, having been released on parole.

So, one family – Poikipaa, remaining in insignificance due to evil fate and intrigues of a rival clan. Another family – Nelikhanka – is a criminal family that everyone is afraid of. It is headed by Brita Nelihanka (Rea Mauranen), a cancer patient, and, after her death from a morphine overdose, the widower Rouku (Aake Kalliala). What is the criminality of the clan, to be honest, is not entirely clear. Yes, Rouku appears to be involved in a ten-year-old murder, but other than that, his area of ​​business interests looks quite respectable. Trade in souvenirs and “reindeer safaris” for a few tourists. Purchase of land plots on which, perhaps, he will someday complete the construction of a mining plant. Yes, plans to build a railway station.

The most transcendent atrocity that Rouku allows himself, trying to replace the will of his deceased wife, is the threat to cut off the genitals of a lawyer. Moreover, the spectacular export by helicopter to the icy desert of the son, who turned out to be the fruit of the betrayal of the deceased Brita. The guy will be stripped naked and left in the midst of white silence. However, he will lose consciousness from the cold, only having done a couple of tens of kilometers on foot, and get off, it seems, with a mild cold. Bogatyrs, not us. The audience would be horrified and admire, but for some reason, as in the case of the love of Sarah and Sameli, at first you are amazed, then you are amused.

Barely making ends meet Poikipaa and respectable Nelikhanka predators are surrounded by a few extras of an openly criminal type. Sameli leads a gang of “Werewolves”. A sort of terrible, bearded and hairy “Hell’s Angels” on the face. For obvious reasons, they dissect not on Harleys, but on snowmobiles. The gang consists of as many as three boys, reminiscent of clowns fired from a burnt traveling circus.

In the list of their illegal acts, announced from the screen, the most impressive seems to be “smuggling of snus”, that is, chewing tobacco. Yes, it’s a terrible thing – duty-free transportation of this muck, villains, whatever you say. True, at some point they have to take on the smuggling of cocaine, but it would be better if they did not.

These “Vikings” are only afraid of the “Fat Seals” gang of the Swede Stagge (Mikael Persbrandt), even more parodic than the Sameli gang. Stagge, dressed in a bloody butcher’s apron, treats guests to a tincture of dead mice. Continuously photographs them with a Polaroid for a hypothetical exhibition called “Before the Beating”. And just as continuously beats cards without the hope of repaying the debt.

Legitimate question: what was it all about? A gloomy drama that, against the will of the director, broke into burlesque? Or burlesque, unsuccessfully pretending at first to be a gloomy drama? The trouble is that both the drama and the burlesque in Kurvinen’s hands are inexorably and tiresomely slipping, just as the jeep of a criminal trying to escape from arrest slips in the very first frames of the film.