A sort of “Divorce Finnish Style,” Mika Kaurismäki's rambunctious new comedy, The House of Branching Love, recounts the breakup of a thirtysomething professional couple. Juhani is a family therapist, and his wife, Tuula, a successful business trainer. They're determined to keep things amicable until they sell their house, but when Juhani brings home a girl he picks up in a club, Tuula flips. The very next day, she brings home her own conquest in retaliation. Emotions long thought dead reappear, and the war escalates precipitously when Juhani begins searching for someone to make Tuula equally jealous.
Juhani calls up his half-brother, Wolffi, a put-upon pimp who wants to hide one of his prostitutes, Nina, from his employers and his wife. (A rather substantial sum of money has gone missing.) Over the course of the film, they all wind up at Juhani and Tuula's house, along with the couple's best friends, the permanently embittered Marjut and the womanizing imp Pekka (who's fond of floridly quoting Shakespearean comedies, an obvious influence on the film); two cops who are having their own marital problems; and, eventually, assorted gangsters.
Running underneath all the commotion is our tendency to pay lip service to social changes and our inability to truly internalize them. Liberal and understanding when he's counselling his clients, Juhani can't cope with his wife's success. (He blames his doughy physique on Tuula's “mannishness.”) Tuula considers Juhani sexually inadequate and remote, and isn't afraid to tell him and everyone else so. Then there are the characters' increasingly complicated and absurd pasts, hanging over their current relationships.
When night falls, all hell breaks loose: the couples exchange partners at a frantic pace and the gangsters finally arrive looking for Nina. Kaurismäki smartly uses this underworld subplot as a metaphor not only for how our past haunts us, but for what happens when people are suddenly presented with unaccustomed autonomy. Ultimately, Tuula and Juhani find out that freedom is much more dangerous than they thought.
A welcome follow-up to Kaurismäki's Three Wise Men, which premiered at last year's Festival, The House of Branching Love provides ample proof that there's nothing funnier, or scarier, than matters of the heart.
Steve Gravestock
Mika Kaurismäki was born in Helsinki. He and his brother Aki were the subject of a spotlight programme at the Festival in 1988. His filmography includes
The Liar (80),
Amazon (90),
Zombie and the Ghost Train (91),
The Last Border (93),
Tigrero – a Film That Was Never Made (94),
Condition Red (95),
L.A. Without a Map (98),
Highway Society (99),
Brasileirinho (05),
Three Wise Men (08) and
The House of Branching Love (09).