Written by Linda
March 02, 2009
When I want to slap the main character in a movie within the first five minutes, that doesn't bode well for the next two hours.
It's not that Somnambulance doesn't have things going for it. A wispy blonde woman staggers along a beach through ocean fog, her heavy clothes soaked to the bone. When she makes it back to the remote shack next to a dramatically lilting lighthouse, her elderly father demands to know why she figuratively and literally missed the boat to freedom. It is World War II in rural Estonia, and the Russian troops are occupying. The few who can flee are escaping to Sweden, but not all are so lucky.
It is an interesting premise for a film, but our lead character Eetla (Katariina Lauk-Tamm) is so astonishingly annoying, that you don't feel too bad when fate finally catches up to her. This young woman rambles on in monologues about how her mother is in Sweden and is a whore. Or she was raped by soldiers. Or is dead. Or maybe it was the daughter herself that was raped. Or a whore. Or she is schitzophrenic. And everything is her father's fault. And poor dad (Evald Aavik) has to listen to all her blathering, to which he ends up turning a deaf ear, choosing instead to tend to his hobby of bird taxidermy.
To shake things up a bit, a stranger named Kasper (Ivo Uukkivi) wanders into their lives. Eetla finds him in the barn and stabs him with a pitchfork, then she and dad decide to take him in. There is of course sexual tension in the household, with Eetla pulling her dress up over her head at a moment's notice. The one truly enjoyable moment is seeing Jesper's "My god, what have I done!" expression the morning after he finally succumbs to her apparently irresistible feminine wiles. Needless to say, the charm of this glassy-eyed rambling heroine didn't work for me. Especially in the scene where she was masturbating with a rifle. Yes, that's right, a rifle. Need I say more?
But I will give the film credit for looking great. The recurring image of the lighthouse, especially, is fantastic. It is a pillar that leans askew, tilting just enough where you expect it to topple at any second. The final image of the film involves this lighthouse, and it undeniably sticks with you.
While the image of the lighthouse is still burned in your head at the conclusion, words flash across the screen explaining that 1 in 5 Estonians died during World War II. A pang of guilt filled my gut momentarily. How can you not be shocked by that? But then it took me only a second to realize that Somnambulance was not the movie to be worthy of representing such horrors. Call me cold, but for me, Eetla was not the appropriate character to represent such tragedy. She was simply an annoyance. Frankly, the end of the film came as a relief.
