Valkoinen kääpiö began as an adaptation of Rösterna i den sena timmen, Bo Carpelan's darkly philosophical novel about a self-centred middle-class community trying to maintain normality in the face of imminent nuclear war. What ended up on the screen, however, was another muddled example of 1980s Finnish art cinema reaching high and falling flat on its face, which only borrowed a few ideas from the book.
The film's first half an hour is actually quite interesting and suspenseful a gambit, as Heiskanen's engineer gets trapped in a mine when the EMP from nuclear explosions near Murmansk plunges Northern Finland into an electrical blackout. He struggles to escape before the radioactive fallout arrives. This section proved chillingly prescient when the Chernobyl nuclear disaster took place, just two months after Valkoinen kääpiö premiered.
But the rest of the film completely switches gears and becomes a confused study of Heiskanen's attempt to cope with his alienation and radiation-induced leukaemia. The forced and false idyll of his family community and a lot of the dialogue here come from Carpelan, but removed from the original context of nuclear doomsday they carry little emotional weight and make little sense with the film's original material. The ecological theme of the planet's future withers away and never really knits together with the thin plot of personal quest for some emotional connection and meaning in the face of sickness and death.
The film tries to compensate with its polished and striking visual style. It piles on heavy symbolic imagery – water dripping and rippling ethereally underground; snake slithering across the debris-littered floor and consumed in an anthill; the constant contrast of darkness and blinding white light; the white-clad image of a blond woman, Heiskanen's idealised, unattainable love that keeps haunting him - and Michaels' colourfully expressionistic music (all brooding 80s synthesizer strings and drones splashed against a couple of romantic acoustic episodes) to suggest meaning and depth that is not really there. To no avail. Underneath the surface's supernova brilliance, the narrative becomes just as lifeless and bereft of meaning as the white dwarf star the protagonist is compared with. Even the vivid closing image, a matching cut from a bloody gash on Heiskanen's arm to a close-up of a crack in the stone, the final, tortured simile between a ravaged planet and the emotionally petrified "man of stone", somehow ends up just a desperate gesture, a paltry imitation of Kubrick's millennia-spanning transition from 2001.
There may in fact be a good film buried somewhere in the half-formed effigy that is Valkoinen kääpiö, but it, unlike Heiskanen's character, never reaches the light.
The film's first half an hour is actually quite interesting and suspenseful a gambit, as Heiskanen's engineer gets trapped in a mine when the EMP from nuclear explosions near Murmansk plunges Northern Finland into an electrical blackout. He struggles to escape before the radioactive fallout arrives. This section proved chillingly prescient when the Chernobyl nuclear disaster took place, just two months after Valkoinen kääpiö premiered.
But the rest of the film completely switches gears and becomes a confused study of Heiskanen's attempt to cope with his alienation and radiation-induced leukaemia. The forced and false idyll of his family community and a lot of the dialogue here come from Carpelan, but removed from the original context of nuclear doomsday they carry little emotional weight and make little sense with the film's original material. The ecological theme of the planet's future withers away and never really knits together with the thin plot of personal quest for some emotional connection and meaning in the face of sickness and death.
The film tries to compensate with its polished and striking visual style. It piles on heavy symbolic imagery – water dripping and rippling ethereally underground; snake slithering across the debris-littered floor and consumed in an anthill; the constant contrast of darkness and blinding white light; the white-clad image of a blond woman, Heiskanen's idealised, unattainable love that keeps haunting him - and Michaels' colourfully expressionistic music (all brooding 80s synthesizer strings and drones splashed against a couple of romantic acoustic episodes) to suggest meaning and depth that is not really there. To no avail. Underneath the surface's supernova brilliance, the narrative becomes just as lifeless and bereft of meaning as the white dwarf star the protagonist is compared with. Even the vivid closing image, a matching cut from a bloody gash on Heiskanen's arm to a close-up of a crack in the stone, the final, tortured simile between a ravaged planet and the emotionally petrified "man of stone", somehow ends up just a desperate gesture, a paltry imitation of Kubrick's millennia-spanning transition from 2001.
There may in fact be a good film buried somewhere in the half-formed effigy that is Valkoinen kääpiö, but it, unlike Heiskanen's character, never reaches the light.
