QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN

Very seldom do historical romantic dramas prove worthwhile. There is something about the genre that encourages reactionary politics that cater to bourgeois interests, often while superficially passing as progressive or feminist, that easily becomes unbearable. After all, how often do you come across historical dramas centred on the affairs of the peasantry rather than the royals? And to add an age gap to the equation? No thanks. Life & Love, an Estonian romantic drama set during the Great Depression, is an exception. While the feature debut from director Helen Takkin doesn’t shatter or defy the genre’s expectations, this doesn’t stop it from being a good film about the psychology of desire, enticing and toxic power dynamics, and the messy pain of love.

Skirting around a tradition of kinky Estonian romances and dramas, Life & Love introduces Karolin Jürise as Irma, a young writer from the countryside who moves to Tallinn in search of work and a better life. Her cousin Lonni (Loviise Kapper) sets her up with a job at a printing house. The big boss, Rudolf (Mait Malmsten), takes a liking to her and asks her to be his maid – a job, he insists, that will be accomplished satisfactorily only if she moves in with him. His intentions turn out questionable, as you can imagine. If there is any silver lining, her situation could technically be worse: his last maid was forced to share his bed. A blood-sucking capitalist in the business world, his love life is filled with just as much lechery and gaslighting.

Interestingly, she denies his advances resolutely and confidently. She is troubled by his boundary stepping, while also sexually aroused by the encounters. When he smells her hair and tries to kiss her neck, she closes her eyes and almost gives in to desire before some other thought pulls her away. She then reports back to Lonni, on the verge of tears, that she refuses to be his “lover.” She quits. He chases her like a lost puppy and proposes, in a movie theatre of all places, and she accepts swiftly. Her initial rejection of his sexual proposition — despite her own desire — and her happiness to become Rudolf’s wife point to the crux of what bothered her in the first place: the distorted and imbalanced relationship. As his wife, at least how she sees it, she can allow her desire to roam free.

Jürise may be a newer face to the scene, but she has what it takes to have a long and successful career if she plays her cards right. Her charming dimple that emerges from her smile instantly will have any viewer on her side of an argument. So much of Irma needs to be communicated in subtleties because of the film’s interest in the psychological. Her body language and facial expressions add considerably to Irma’s depth that a lesser performance would have tripped over. Her custom and make-up design excellently complement her performances too as her well-kept and ornate hair and outfit choices inch toward more pedestrian choices as her relationship with Rudolf disintegrates back into its unhealthy norm. In one subtle detail, she coughs trying to smoke a cigarette early on and gradually becomes a smoker, poisoning her body willingly, as she becomes more intertwined with Rudolf.

Life & Love really earns its mettle with its production qualities. Takkin and cinematographer Alvar Kõue abandon the boring and lazily-lit high-dynamic range look that dominates the romances on streaming platforms. The creators are not afraid of moody lighting and diverse shot types. A few early fluid camera movements impress just as much as anything to come out of Hollywood but they do so with more humility, ending the long shots when the film demands it and not when the filmmakers know that their craftsmanship will undoubtedly be recognized by the audience. The same could be said of the production design, even if this work gets a bit more limited as Irma becomes glued to the home.

Speaking of their home: the sex honestly isn’t that weird. And technically, there isn’t really any coitus. Sexuality and sexual desire matter tremendously but it’s mostly present in Life & Love the same way sexuality can appear in a pop music video: to spark desire without actually showing anything. Instead, Takkin takes the old-school metaphorical and suggestive route. Rudolf’s “dirty secret” is that he keeps jars of blood leeches in his bedroom. He uses them to “suck the evil” out of his body. He has Irma put leeches on his body in one scene, and you don’t need to be a professor of semiotics to figure out what’s being hinted at through this leech kink. That said, a sexually aware film with funky power dynamics and leeches could have easily gone in a much weirder direction.

Irma’s writing revolves around a previous lover, Eedi (Ursel Tilk), who also recently moved to Tallinn, got a job at the butchery, and is now in the process of partnering up with Lonni. As an intelligent man from the working class, he also has an important role in an uprising work-class oriented political party — a position ideologically at odds with Irma’s current lover’s exploitative business practices (a pattern of exploitation that mirrors into his romantic life). Irma always looks out of place at Rudolf’s bohemian parties that always feel one drink away from an orgy. As both a maid and a wife, her countryside and humble origin make her a foreigner in the bourgeois small talk of Rudolf’s friends.And, in what seems consistent with Eedi’s political ideology, it’s impossible for the exploiter capitalist and the exploited labourer and lover to create a loving life together.

Life & Love just premiered in the Baltic Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.