Unknown Soldier

Lieutenant Kariluoto (Johannes holopainen) leads an attack early in Tuntematon Sotilas (Uknown Soldier)

This is a review I’ve been trying to write since March. Back in the spring I learned that Unknown Soldiers, a new film version of Väino Linna’s great war novel, which I reviewed here last year, had just become available in the US. I immediately ordered a copy. Since then I’ve watched it five or six times. The 80th anniversary of the beginning of the Winter War finally got me to finish this review.

A little background

Eighty years ago tomorrow, Soviet Russia invaded Finland, an unprovoked act of aggression meant to subjugate Russia’s northwestern neighbor as it already had other smaller, weaker countries like Estonia. That war, the Talvisota or Winter War, lasted just over one hundred days. The Finns fought the Russians to a standstill, killing over 200,000 and wounding many more, and forced Stalin to the bargaining table. In exchange for peace, Stalin forced the Finns to concede border territories that the Russians had long coveted, including the Karelian isthmus, from which thousands of civilians fled before the Soviet takeover.

The Winter War is the stuff of legend. It was also only the first of three wars the Finns would fight between 1939 and 1945.

The second and longest of these wars is known as the Continuation War, which began in June 1941, about a year and a half after the end of the Winter War. This time the Finns went on the offensive. They partnered with the Germans and, with the Wehrmacht, planned and coordinated their attack to coincide with the Germans’ Operation Barbarossa. The Finns quickly recaptured former Finnish territory and pressed onward, capturing Russian territory and holding it tenaciously for several years. But in the end the Russians turned them back and, through overwhelming numbers and vast superiority in armor, air, and logistical power (helped indirectly by the United States, our Lend-Lease program propping up an ungrateful Stalin for a long stretch of the war), the Russians forced the Finns to conclude a second peace agreement with Stalin in September 1944. They regained none of the territory lost in the Winter War, and lost yet more.

Little of this matters very much to the characters of Unknown Soldier—at least, not on the grand geopolitical scale. Their concerns are simpler, more concrete—life and death; food, warm clothing, dry shelter, and good cover in a bombardment; and, in some cases, quite literally hearth and home.

The company of soldiers

Jussi Vatanen as Lieutenant Koskela in Tuntematon Sotilas

Unknown Soldier (Finnish title: Tuntematon sotilas), based on the novel of the same name by Väino Linna, a veteran of the Continuation War, tells the story of a company of machine gunners in the Finnish army through the whole course of the war. Linna’s novel is a classic of Finnish literature and of the war genre—it’s one of the best I’ve ever read—and has been adapted for film twice previously. I haven’t had a chance to see those versions, but this new one, based on the novel’s unedited manuscript version and co-written and directed by Aku Louhimies, is excellent.

The film introduces its main characters as they muster in for the invasion of Russia. The film narrows the novel’s large cast down to a core group with whom we’ll spend the majority of the three hour story. Young Hietanen and his giggly buddy Vanhala are two major characters introduced at the start, along with some of their buddies: Lehto, a tough, ill-tempered plug of a man who embraces hard duty; Lahtinen, a stalwart leftist who doesn’t believe in the war; Rahikainen, a ne’er-do-well who always has an angle, and others. We also meet several officers who will offer widely varying examples of leadership: young, idealistic, naïve Kariluoto; the stiff disciplinarian Lammio; and Koskela, the ideal combination of guts, good sense, and endurance.

The men join the attack and days, then weeks of the endless forests of Karelia pass by. Casualties mount—first the unit’s original commander, an old White from the days of the Finnish Civil War, then men killed in attacks on the Russians or ambushed on patrol. One patrol ends particularly badly, with a good man left behind—when they find him later, he has not been killed by the Russians as first reported, but has killed himself rather than be captured.

Reinforcements in the form of reservists arrive, including young, inexperienced men, eccentrics like Honkajoki, who carries a longbow and experiments with perpetual motion machines in his spare time, and perhaps the best character in both the book and the film, Antti Rokka. Rokka is a Karelian farmer and for him the war is personal—he lost his farm in the settlement from the Winter War, and hopes to get it back for himself, his wife, and their growing family. For Hietanen too the war becomes personal, as he strikes up a romance with a Russian girl he befriends in Petroskoi, a Russian city on Lake Onega that the Finns capture as a bargaining chip.

As the first winter of this war arrives and the Russians recover from their surprise at the onslaught, the men repel repeated Russian counterattacks and settle into elaborate networks of trenches. Koskela proves himself a caring and capable leader, courageous, unfussy, and popular with his men, and Rokka proves himself a tough and uncompromising warrior, singlehandedly wiping out a Russian platoon sent to flank them in one instance and escaping capture during a trench raid only to turn the tables and wipe out his attackers in another. Nevertheless both men come in for criticism by their superiors—the injustice of it is bewildering in the face of what we’ve seen.

The war drags on. Two Christmases pass. Rokka’s family grows. The weight of the accumulated boredom and separation from family piles onto these men. If a sense of melancholy hangs over the film it is not only because of the grind of modern warfare, but because of its almost Homeric sense of dramatic irony—we all know how this war must end. The drama comes in worrying about which characters will make it.

The final hour of the film covers the Finnish retreat. It’s harrowing. The line repeatedly crumbles and acts of desperate courage and self-sacrifice are all that keep the Russians from overwhelming and completely destroying the Finnish troops. We see incredible bravery—men counterattack in ones and twos to save their retreating comrades—and not a little stupidity, and the highs of individual courage are sometimes immediately smothered by the wasting of blood by the soldier’s commanders. It’s a mess.

I don’t want to spoil anything, but a great number of characters we have come to know and love die, sometimes with cruel pointlessness. The film ends with wordless images of the war’s cost—a grieving mother, photographs of young soldiers with black ribbons across their frames, civilians fleeing the Russians, a pregnant widow.

On the attack

Eero Aho as Antti Rokka in Tuntematon Sotilas

Unknown Soldier is one of the most beautiful war films I’ve seen. Shot digitally using almost all natural light, it’s magnificent to look at and the naturalism of its imagery helps sell the combat as real. Other scenes, especially those on the homefront—a perspective missing from the book and presented in poetic, often wordless vignettes here—echo the composition and lighting of the masters of the northern renaissance. The scenes back home at Rokka’s farm are especially beautiful and moving.

The battle scenes, always excellent in Finnish movies, are intense and carefully staged, with exacting attention to period equipment and detail. I especially appreciated the care taken to put the viewer in the perspective of the troops themselves—the camera mostly stays at their level and the enemy is almost always seen from a great distance, if they’re seen at all. It almost comes as a shock when Rokka captures a Russian officer and we see that the Russians are just men, not malevolent spirits that strike pitilessly from the woods. The sense of danger the viewer gets from this presentation is intense and sometimes uncomfortable—you really can’t see what’s out there in the woods, and sometimes it gets the jump on you. While not exceptionally gory, the combat really feels violent, and the guts of the men who stand up and face death in the moment they’re needed is all the more awe-inspiring as a result.

The performances are also excellent, particularly those of Eero Aho as Rokka, Jussi Vatanen as Koskela, Aku Hirviniemi as Hietanen, and Hannes Suominen as the cheerful jokester Vanhala—who reaches the end of the film, true to his counterpart in the book, greatly sobered. Vatanen’s Koskela in particular wears a heavy foreboding in his otherwise warm and down-to-earth expression that only underlines his bravery. He knows what the war is eventually going to demand of him, and marches to meet it anyway. You can see why his men follow him, especially as he holds the disintegrating unit together in the face of the Red Army’s onslaught at the end of the war.

In conclusion

I’ve written before, in my essay on the Finnish film The Winter War, about the different perspectives a war film can take—God’s eye, worm’s eye, and so forth. For over twenty years now, since Saving Private Ryan reinvigorated the genre, the worm’s eye view has been predominant, and rightly so—that perspective, which so carefully limits knowledge and so heavily emphasizes the grit, discomfort, and terror of war, is perhaps the best for conveying what a war is like. Unknown Soldier is an outstanding example of the technique.

But the war film Unknown Soldier reminds me of most is The Thin Red Line. Both are thoughtful, poetic, and sometimes mournful in tone, both feature wide casts of characters battling both the enemy and the environment, and both give attention to the look and feel of that environment. Its beautifully moody score by Lass Enersen also reminds me tonally of Hans Zimmer’s work on that film. But Unknown Soldier never drifts into the meandering abstraction of The Thin Red Line and, while tragic, the narrative never feels aimless. Where The Thin Red Line is almost a philosophical allegory, Unknown Soldier is an invitation to reflect on what war means and what it costs, using concrete examples, soldiers who feel like living and breathing men, from a truly brutal conflict.

Again—it’s excellent, and well worth seeking out.