Juha

A pleasant little trifle - a modern-day Finnish silent film, with few intertitles (but a somewhat tacky music score) about a decent cabbage farmer whose wife is lured away by a seedy underworld type. The film sketches their initial contented lifestyle with deliberate naivete ("Happy as children," says the caption), all the better to set up the ultimate tragedy. Cleanly and simply shot, the film is obviously no great shakes, but it places itself with total conviction within the silent film aesthetic - tipping us off to the villain's nastiness, for example, through an unselfconscious shot of him stepping gleefully on a butterfly; and also finding room for a classic-type shot of a dog running after the bus carrying away his master. The design of just-so-slightly exaggerated faces and postures is sustained quite well, setting up an ending that seems authentically modern and tragic for all its bogeyman-type trappings.