| review: Matti |
|
|
| Written by Boyd van Hoeij | |
| Monday, 08 May 2006 | |
 The healthy career symbiosis between young Finnish actor Jasper Pääkkönen and popular director Aleksi Mäkelä comes to full fruition in their biopic of local ski jumping legend Matti Nykänen simply titled Matti. The film’s story is perhaps a bit too over-simplified to be the definite biography of the wild life of Nykänen, but the sheer likeability of Pääkkönen’s performance makes you feel sorry for the sad-sack loser even though your rationale keeps telling you you shouldn’t.
Pääkkönen is quickly making a name for himself in Finnish cinema, after portraying the youngest of four Chippendale-style burglar brothers in Mäkelä’s crowd-pleaser Pahat pojat (Bad Boys, 2003), a smaller role in Mäkelä’s noir Vares and first billing in the bleak parable Paha maa (Frozen Land, Aku Louhimies, 2005), which was showered with prizes on the international festival circuit. In Matti the slight thespian essays a top athlete who is brought down by the poisonous combination of alcoholism and wrong friends – or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say friend, since the dubious honour (in the film at least) rests solely on the broad shoulders of Mati’s self-styled manager Nick Nevada (Peter Franzén). In the screenplay by Marko Leino (who debuted with the adaptation of Minä ja Morrison/Me and Morrison), their relationship is mainly based on Nick’s feeding off Matti’s gullibility, which is likely to be an over-simplification of a relationship that was probably self-destructive on both sides (though 1984 and 1988 Olympic Gold winner Nykänen obviously had a lot more to lose). Throw in a national ski association that is more interested in selling tickets and profiting from the jumpers’ popularity rather than coaching healthy, well-behaved athletes and you have a recipe for disaster.
Nykänen went from one of the country’s reasons for national pride to its laughingstock as sport successes were replaced in the headlines by outbursts of domestic violence, alcohol-soaked experiments during training time, several marriages, bankruptcies and dubious new lines of work to capitalise on his fame – including turns as a singer and a stripper. Famous for expressing himself rather awkwardly to the point of obscuring the meaning of what he says, Leino and director Mäkelä have found an elegant solution for providing some much-needed depth and sympathy for Matti by providing him with a voice-over during the film’s opening and closing scenes that translates in comprehensible prose what Matti seems to feel inside. Over two hours, the film is on the long side and too fragmented to make complete sense for an outsider without any knowledge of Matti’s antics; the rushed treatment of the case that makes him land in jail is especially fuzzy. The decision to include very little sports footage is admirable (and was probably cost-reducing for the producers) and feels right, since the sport seems to exist only on the periphery of Matti’s vision too.
Mäkelä, in his third outing with the young thespian, coaxes a terrific performance out of Pääkkönen, whose Matti inspires the kind of love despite all faults that most parents feel for their children – a sentiment likely spurred on by Pääkonen’s voluptuous helpings of baby fat. In terms of production design, the eighties are not so much invoked as they are conjured up in a nightmare of bad hairdos, particularly unflattering clothing and ridiculously oversized Nokias. Browse: amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.fr, amazon.de, dvdGO.es, internetbookshop.it, nl.bol.com, allposters.com.
|
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|