The award winning Estonian film “Somnambulance” was screened here in Ottawa on November 26, 2004, as part of the National Library Archives European Union Film Festival. The 2004 EU Film Festival offers films from 24 European member states, among them Estonia.
The brochure thumbnail sketch of this film describes it as taking place in Estonia in autumn 1944. A young woman leaves the last boat headed for Sweden giving up her last chance to escape the oncoming Red Army. She lives in a lighthouse with her father and is described as seeking refuge in her dreams. The film is portrayed as “a potent powerful psychological drama”.
My parents were boat people who escaped to Sweden just in the nick of time. I remember my mother telling me how entire villages emptied of people trying to escape the Red Horde that was about to descend on them for the second time. After the first occupation of Estonia by the Soviet Union nobody had any illusions about the horror that was about to happen again.
Given this background, I was especially pleased that my son and his significant other wanted to come with me. My son is very familiar with what his grandparents went through, but she had no idea and was looking forward to learning something about Estonia.
Although the acting and photography is well done, I personally found the film depressing and after 129 minutes of listening to an excellent actress portraying a crazy person, I felt the film could have benefited from careful editing to shorten it and make the story line more understandable. Some members of the Ottawa Estonian community asked me later at the coatroom whether I was going to write it up for the paper. I replied that I didn’t know.
On the way home I asked the young people what their impression was. The reply I got was that the sketch of the film in the brochure must have been about another film altogether. They were expecting to learn a bit about Estonia and not view some crazy girl living by the sea screaming at her father and going on and on about it. While they both agreed that the ending is explosive, they felt it could have been made to happen much sooner. Both were confused as to why she left the boat in the first place. There is some script that comes on at the very end that briefly rolls by in both languages, but you have to be quick and they both felt that the note just doesn’t tie in with the movie. The script of course is a short backgrounder about what happened to Estonia and that it lost a fifth of its population because of the war. Perhaps this should come at the beginning of the film and could be slowed down and or expanded.
Would I recommend the film? A qua
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Estonian Film “Somnambulance” (2)
Archived Articles | 03 Dec 2004 | Peeter BushEWR
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