QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN

When we first meet middle-aged sisters Taina (Pirjo Lonka) and Pirkko (Elina Knihtilä) in writer/director Teemu Nikki’s 100 Litres of Gold, they are presented as just a couple of comical eccentrics among an ensemble of quirky characters in their village of Sysmä. Pirkko is singing along to her laptop, Taina is crafting a weird mosaic,in fact one of a series that all depict cars crashing, and they have a sideline brewing sahti, a traditional Finnish ale, which has been part of their family for three generations, and is a source of constant tension with their cousin and rival-in-brewing Ponu Paavo. The illicit trade in sahti is a tough business. Its operators (including the sisters) behave like cowboys, and their hard negotiations with customers are shot by DP Jarmo Kiuru to resemble standoffs in a spaghetti western. The sisters drive a particularly hard bargain, and take no nonsense from anyone, even as they strive to craft the perfect 10-point brew and to impress their father (a decorated master brewer). They also, as inveterate drinkers, have a bad habit of getting high on their own supply.

So it is that when their other sister Päivi (Ria Kataja) arrives from Helsinki with her artist fiancé Nestori (Jakob Ohrman) in tow, and requests that Tania and Pirkko have 100 litres of their finest sahti ready for the coming wedding, the two sisters manage both to make the finest batch of their lives, and to go on a bender drinking it all themselves two days before the marriage. Now, hungover and still chasing the hair of the dog, they must race to secure 100 litres of at least half-decent sahti from elsewhere, even if that means calling in debts, begging and stealing – and along the way, they will keep on drinking, dooming their every effort to more hapless, reeling failure.

In his wedding speech, the sisters’ father will point out that in Sysmä, no birth, no marriage and no funeral goes unaccompanied by sahti, which is to say that the drink lubricates every aspect of life, and that Sysmä is a microcosm for Finnish society at large (as Pirkko says after being fired for drunkenness, if the same principle were universally applied, everyone in Finland would be unemployed). Yet what starts as a breezy, whacky comedy about these characters’ jolly drunken japes quickly takes on a darker edge, as we see the self-destructive impact that alcohol has had on every aspect of these sisters’ lives. A drunken accident 30 years earlier has left Päivi literally (and permanently) legless, Taina’s lasting guilt at her own involvement in this incident is what has lent her compulsive outsider art its obsessive preoccupation with vehicular collisions, and Pirkko’s inability to stop drinking and act responsibly will see her lose not just her job, but her health and even her sister. Indeed, everyone walks away from this film scarred in one way or another.

Nikki is very good at switching between the epic, heroic qualities that these characters grandiosely apportion to themselves and their own actions, and the rather more pathetic, shabby and embarrassing way that they look to others – and there is here, as in Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round (2020), a careful slippage from amiable antics to something far more serious. For this domestic saga about a family broken by its own addiction to alcohol, and too delirious and deluded even to acknowledge the problem, turns out to be not only a tragedy, but a sobering national allegory.

100 Litres of Gold just premiered in the Official Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.