Movie review • Under Your Skin ( Käpy selän alla ) by Mikko Niskanen: The hottest of its time.

 A film which aroused aggravation, opposition, but also fervent admiration.

Under your skin is considered by the Finnish critic Peter von Bagh as one of those pivotal films which marked in Finland, during the Sixties, the passage "from the old [to] the new cinema. " A point of view that comes straight from the inaugural moments of the film. Nothing is a priori more imbued with Finnish tradition than the landscape unfolding during the credits: that of a vast lake located in the heart of a deep forest where birches and conifers intertwine, at the feet of which run massive swaths of trees. blueberries and lingonberries. By summoning such a representation, Mikko Niskanen thus seems to first register his film in line with an iconographic canon developed at the dawn of the twentieth century. That is, the one forged by the painters of Finnish National Romanticism. And more particularly by Akseli Gallen-Kallela, whose predominantly lacustrine and sylvan canvases defined an imagery of Finnish space then reproduced by national cinema in the first half of the 20th century. Like, among other films, the flamboyant country melodramas of Teuvo Tulio, The Song of the Scarlet Flower (1938) and the film In the Fields of Dreams (1940). But the classicism of the visual motif of the first moments of Under Your Skin is immediately subverted by the radical modernity of the shooting. Impressing his camera in a 360-degree panoramic movement, moreover making it rotate on its axis at a speed going crescendo, Mikko Niskanen develops an image as original as it is surprising. The wise and long-awaited postcard first transforms into an almost abstract composition. Then it generates an almost hypnotic effect in the viewer, making the credits of under your skin a kind of filmic equivalent to the experiments of kinetic art.

The visual whirlwind of the opening of the film, however, soon ceases, giving way to the film's first segment. If the camera becomes wiser then, Mikko Niskanen’s aesthetic innovation bias does not diminish. The initial scenes of the film, classically intended to portray the characters and their relationships, indeed take the form of an astonishing mix of genres. The filmmaker first uses the musical comedy register. An elegant traveling shot follows the actress Kristiina Halkola - playing the character of Riitta - as she performs with talent and conviction a song with a text placed under the sign of revolt. The young woman indeed proclaims her desire for a genuinely free life, freed from the moral and economic standards of a society whose hypocrisy and inequalities she denounces. This is how the program of demands and criticism of Under Your Skin is expressed, the subversive dimension of which, as we will now have understood, is not only plastic but also ideological. This sung piece is soon followed by very truthful images - one might imagine from an amateur vacation movie - showing the four heroes of the film. We see young city dwellers walking through the forest, weighed down by their camper gear. But this return to reality soon gives way to a new choice of realization with assumed artificiality. Since Mikko Niskanen then opts for singular still shots, photographing his characters like living statues to finish presenting them to the viewer.

The formal diversity thus deployed during the opening moments of under your skin never falters during the rest of the film, even intensifying. under your skin thus creates a second sung episode, this time devoted to actress Kirsti Wallasvaara in charge of the role of Leena, as touching in the exercise as Kristiina Halkola was. The documentary vein also remains present. For example during sequences devoted to the daily life of a rough Finnish farm or even at a country ball, all carried by a look of almost ethnological precision. To these two registers Mikko Niskanen also adds that of comedy. The latter often affects a subtle tone, relying to do this on finely chiseled dialogues, especially during particularly brilliant marivauding sequences ... But the comic can also be much stronger; the filmmaker does not hesitate to play with an uninhibited earthiness of the invasive presence of a recalcitrant pig or even the effects of excess drinking on his quartet of characters ...

Often removed, even very funny, Under your skin also shows a powerful sensuality when the filmmaker takes his film on the side of assumed eroticism. The chain of incisive shots energizing the comedy passages is then replaced by lascivious sequence shots. Playing only the single scale of shots, Mikko Niskanen first recreates the rise of desire in his characters by gradually bringing his camera closer to their naked bodies and magnified by the powerful summer sun embrace, in favor of an accomplice undergrowth or an isolated cove, culminating for the lovers of the film in an enjoyment whose intensity is rendered by a montage suddenly resuming in nervousness. And so on the screen is composed a disturbing kaleidoscope of fleeting shots: some revealing a hand kneading a hip here, a breast there, others showing a face transfigured by pleasure...

As convincing in these moments of love as they were in the moments of humor, the actors, all blessed with a beautiful and wide range of acting, deploy the same talent when the film finally takes on the appearance of psychodrama in a Bergman accents. More particularly on the occasion of an impressive sequence showing the couple formed by Riitta and Santtu (Eero Melasniemi) clash violently under the haggard gaze of Leena and Timppa (Pekka Autiovuori)... Because if the comic and erotic episodes of the film -of a willingly Edenic tone- for a time let believe that a freer existence was possible, the bitter conclusion of the film seems to suggest that these moments were in reality only an enchanted parenthesis…

However, is Under your skin a pessimistic work, content to record the failure of the aspirations for freedom of the Finnish youth of the time? Undoubtedly not if we ultimately come back to the formal dimension of the film. By blending with happiness artificiality, comic and tragic or even refinement and triviality, Mikko Niskanen's production after all makes a brilliant demonstration that a cinematographic revolution is not only conceivable but above all possible. If the advent of another cinema is therefore possible, why should it not be the same for another life? Placed, like the film by Mikko Niskanen, under the sign of daring and diversity? This is undoubtedly the stimulating proposition that the Finnish director makes to the viewer with Under your skin.