Melancholian 3 huonetta

Hello,

I just saw Three rooms of melancholia and I strongly disagree with some of the reviews. I must say I have no experience with homeless children in Russia but that's not what the film is about. I don't understand that You don't understand, this film is about "melancholia" (which the title indicates) and regarding this, the Three rooms of melancholia suffices. It is poetic documentary, and you will hardly find interviews in this cinematic mode. It tries not to judge and I think it succeeded. For example: it shows that the army saves children from the streets but on the other hand prepares them to be soldiers in cruel wars. The film touches the very soul of the "problem" and does not concern personal problems, told in cheap (American- style)interviews. It is a tacit portrait about the poems of that one boy and the grief of the mother and the fact that the boys in Ingushetia have little interest in a new day, that are symbols of the happiness, grief and aftermath of a compléte nation. I can understand that your topic of preference is not treated the way You would do it (probably to attend everybody to it) but then, this is not a news report nor some charity attention, but a film about the artist's interpretation of melancholia.

As a volunteer working with homeless children and youth in St Petersburg I had high expectations of the film 3 Rooms of Melancholia, since the film was said to reflect emotional and mental states related to children rejected from dysfunctional families and in general to the homeless.

However after seeing the film, I want to address that I am utterly shocked by the selfish and insensitive way the director Honkasalo dealt with the subjects of her documentary. Instead of giving the child interviewees a voice and a chance to talk about their lives before and during their military boarding school, this director serves us a series of narrated pathos-embedded statements depicting their awful backgrounds. As the homeless boys in the film are clearly working on restoring their crushed egos by trying to function progressively as group members in an institution accepted and respected by the society they live in, this immature, socio-pornographic primadonna comes with her pathological need to throw Gothic sensations out of her poetic dirt-bag. How little can a person understand the ashamed mind of the homeless and rejected and still be allowed to direct documentaries about this subject? The people awarding this documentary with human rights film prizes have little sense of the actual need the rejected and homeless have to be accepted as strong, progressive, dynamic characters who despite their socially disgraceful backgrounds can have their say in life without being publicly Kain-marked as the hopelessly pitiful.

This film is divided in three sections, or "rooms" as the title alludes to. The first "room", "Longing" shows life at a military academy near St. Petersburg for lads from troubled homes or orphaned boys. Some of the kids have lost parents in the Chechyan war. We are documentary-style introduced to some of the cadets.

"Breathing", the second "room" takes us to war-ravaged Grozny in Checnya. We witness the hardship the denizens of this once thriving city are facing. Apartment buildings are mere skeletons with walls shot away, yet there are people living there. In a heartbreaking scene we see how a welfare official takes away the young children of an ailing woman who can't look after her kids anymore. The mother is severely affected by poisonous fumes escaping from open and damaged oil-wells close to her apartment building.

The third "room", "Remembering" shows war orphans and refugees settled in tented camps and with farmers in Ingushetia, a few kilometers from the Chechnyan border. We get a documentary-style glimpse in the life of a few newly-resettled refugees in a Muslim farming community, living in a peaceful bucolic setting, whilst by contrast in the distance one could hear shelling taking place in troubled Chechnya.

This film has a strong anti-war message, in a clever way it shows us an unsentimental view of the impact of war on the innocent. And in a nagging and worrying twist of irony we remember the cadets we met in the first "room", already training for more warfare.

This hauntingly beautiful art-film boasts some of the best photography I had seen in a long time. The first "room" boasts atmospheric shots of the training academy and surrounds in winter, while the third "room" shows us a vividly-coloured, much greener pastoral landscape. The photographer effectively mixes sweeping landscape footage with lingering shots of certain foci, such as a horse grazing next to a fence. The stunner, however, is the second "room" where we are treated with grainy black-and-white imagery. Memorable scenes include a few mangy dogs scavenging for food scraps among the ruins of shelled buildings. The music score is excellent too, and adds to the general melancholic ambiance of the film.

People looking for a simple film with a clear plot may be disappointed; there is little plot or suspense, and the film may seem to be diffuse at times. But look a bit deeper and you are in for a pleasant discovery.

'3 Rooms of Melancholia' is recommended for the serious film-lover. 9/10.

I am very taken of the silent way Honkasalo has documented this topic. She has managed to form a very touching, dramatic yet aesthetic picture of the problems that children face in war. This is an issue way too little discussed and I hope that one day the tragedies of Chechnya would be in the media spotlight in the way the middle east. Sadly Russia's "democracy" is something that the west does not want to touch since we depend on e.g. natural resources that Putin kindly provides us. This documentary will shock, even if it really doesn't bring anything new that one wouldn't have known from before. But it doesn't gloat with the suffering and violence that the children have had to go through, but rather lets you feel and empathize for yourself - have your own feelings.

I expected a lot from this documentary as I had heard many hailing opinions about it, especially from representatives of the Finnish Film Foundation and Finnish AVEK which were the main backers of the film. Even though I had read that Honkasalo made only one brief shooting trip to Checnya for this documentary (Anna Politkovskaja made more than 60 trips for her fatal honest writing) I had full trust in the content of it.

Unfortunately I have to confess that I was terribly disappointed with The Three Rooms of Melancholia. The only thing that made me smile was the view of the end credits and the fact that I had been smart enough to borrow the tape for free. It was really hard to watch this over-pretentious film, cause it was so dreadfully boring due to its contrived and hopelessly thick and artificial feeling of fake melancholy. A gray lifeless sentiment the director Pirjo Honkasalo holds lazily onto throughout the film, arrogantly ignoring the audience natural need for at least some occasional change in the mood.

Despite this complete failure, I think Pirjo Honkasalo's next film Pattaya Go! Go! - currently in the cooker with one of the funniest documentary directors in Scandinavia and with the Finnish Dokumenttikilta association - will become a very thought-provoking and different kind of documentary. In the name of art and entertainment Pirjo Honkasalo will together with her creative allies boldly tell the true story of a group of freshly sacked Finnish paper mill workers' shameless sex trip to Pattaya in Thailand.