SF-paraati
Director: Yrjö Norta
Writer: Tapio Piha
Cast: Ansa Ikonen, Tauno Palo, Aku Korhonen

Plot:
Ansa (Ansa Ikonen) is a tour guide in Helsinki, Tanu (Tauno Palo) is a cab driver and they both flirt a lot with each other as they drive around the city. But suddenly both of them find themselves unemployed. In a burst of creativity, they end up writing a song together – Tanu the melody and Ansa the lyrics. A song that proves increasingly popular and that could mean an end to their financial problems – if only they manage to keep their relationship together as well.

The film was shown at the Filmmuseum where it’s description promised that the light musical comedy covered way more critical subtext and showed all the problems of Finnish pre-WWII society. To be honest, I did not see that subtext – but I did enjoy the main text.

What I found most interesting about the film was the fact that it felt completely like a Hollywood film of that time to me. Sometimes I even had to remind myself that I actually needed the subtitles because the film wasn’t in English. That it didn’t feel Finnish to me, maybe that’s the reason that I didn’t see the Finnish society and its problems in the margins of the film either.

In any case it’s a film brimming over with energy, just as its main characters. They whisk you from scene to scene at a breakneck speed, so that you barely notice that the plot is really thin.

It all culminates in a song battle: since Ansa and Tanu have different ideas about one of the song’s notes, they decide to hire their own orchestras to play their respective versions. At the same time, in the same place. With a certain elation I saw that Ansa had hired an all female orchestra. With a certain bitterness and quite unsurprisingly I saw that at the final post-reconciliation concert, the female orchestra is only used as a prop in a mock-battle – the rest of the concert is played by the all-male orchestra Tanu hired.

But the film generally has a nice sense of humor and it’s very entertaining, despite a few lengths. In the end I had enough of the song, though, and I wouldn’t have wished for the film to go on any longer. In any case I had fun.

Summarizing: Entertaining enough.