Juho Kuosmanen on The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki
The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki is about an unassuming Finnish boxer who has his nation's hopes pinned on his success. We speak to its director, Juho Kuosmanen, a Finn who's also carrying his country's ambitions on his shoulders
It’s a warm Ascension day in Helsinki, and the city’s residents are out enjoying the clement weather. One Finn who can’t fully embrace the public holiday, however, is Juho Kuosmanen. Not only is the 37-year-old filmmaker scheduled to speak to The Skinny over lunch, also troubling him is the fact that in exactly two weeks time the world premiere of his first feature, The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki, will take place under the microscope of the world’s film community at the Cannes Film Festival.
As we tuck into a plate of seasonal white asparagus at the insistence of our Finnish Film Foundation host, Kuosmanen explains that the prospect of debuting at Cannes has been playing on his mind for a while: six years, to be exact. The reason being his previous short film, The Painting Sellers, won Cannes’ Cinefondation in 2010, and part of the prize is a return invite to the festival. “It was a nice situation but also a very scary one,” Kuosmanen says in a deliberate voice that’s as unhurried and gentle as his filmmaking. “When you’re writing your first feature and know for certain it’s going to be screening in Cannes, the pressure is quite huge.”
Not only will The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki screen in the festival, it's been selected for the prestigious Un Certain Regard section, Cannes' competition celebrating films, as its title suggests, with a singular point of view. Kuosmanen will be up against big names like Hirokazu Kore-eda (After the Storm) and David Mackenzie (Hell or High Water) as well as future indie hit Captain Fantastic and StudioGhibli animation The Red Turtle.
Adding to the stress is the rarity of a Finnish film featuring in Cannes at all, unless it’s made by Aki Kaurismäki, the country’s one internationally famous auteur. “I think a lot of [the pressure] is in my own head,” suggests Kuosmanen, “but still I can see what Finnish film commentators are writing, things like ‘he’s a promising new talent’ and ‘he’s going to bring Finnish film to the European level.’” These encouraging words have become a monkey on the young filmmaker’s back.
In an unexpected way, however, this weight of expectations helped Kuosmanen connect with a story he wanted to tell: that of Olli Mäki, a talented real-life amateur boxer, who, in 1962, became the first Finn to compete for a world boxing championship when he was railroaded by his manager and Finnish promoters with dollar/markka signs in their eyes into fighting American world champ Davey Moore.
“I felt it was very easy to relate to this guy who had this chance of a lifetime and then he fears that it’s going to turn out to be a catastrophe,” explains Kuosmanen with an endearing modesty that’s so rare in his industry. “You can see from all the newspaper headlines at the time people were hoping for him to be the next champion, and he doesn’t feel the same way.”
From the short time we’ve spent in Finland meeting Kuosmanen and other Finnish filmmakers, we’ve noticed what could be argued to be a rather dysfunctional attitude to success that isn’t a million miles from the gloomy collective mindset here in the UK. On the one hand, this is a glass half empty kind of nation. “People in Finland think they are realists, but really they’re quite pessimistic,” agrees Kuosmanen – his trepidation about showing his film at Cannes the perfect example. “It’s part of our nature,” he shrugs. “Mentally we’re more Eastern European than Scandinavian.”
On the other hand, however, they long for international glory from sportsmen like Mäki and artists like Kuosmanen. “I do find it funny that we’re a really competitive nation, and whenever we achieve something it makes the headlines, even if it’s really worth something or not, it’s always a big moment,” he takes a long pause, as if just coming to this epiphany: “our relationship to success is not healthy at all.”
The Finnish people are right to have their hopes high for The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki, however. In Kuosmanen’s hands, the tired boxing movie genre feels fresh again, and the result is a bittersweet knockout.
Centred on the weeks leading up to the championship bout, there’s a graceful pivot by Kuosmanen and co-writer Mikko Myllylahti that avoids the underdog sport cliches and instead focuses in on an event just on the periphery of the three ring media circus surrounding the fight: Olli (Jarkko Lahti) falling head over heels for Raija (Oona Airola), a young woman he meets at a country wedding.
It’s not an ideal time to be falling in love. Olli is such a genial, easygoing chap, we suspect he didn’t have the killer instincts of a world class pugilist to begin with, but his feelings of amour really take the edge off. There’s a sense too that Olli is happy with the distraction. Not only because he genuinely adores Raija, but because the rigors of his gruelling new training regime and even more draining promotional duties (from which Kuosmanen mines some beautifully observed humour) seem to have soured the sport from which he once got great joy.
Like its eponymous character, The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki doesn’t necessarily look like a world conqueror. And it certainly doesn’t scream Un Certain Regard contender. Recent winners from this strand have included Khmer Rouge doc The Missing Picture, canines-bite-back horror White God, brutal bullying drama After Lucia and absurdist confinement comedy Dogtooth. Olli Mäki’s open-hearted humanism stands out in this company like a baby labrador in a kennel of pit bulls.
“When you’re preparing a first feature and know it’s going to be in Cannes, you can’t escape the thinking of ‘What kind of film should it be to be worthy of the greatest festival in the world?’” says Kuosmanen. “Then you get lost because you’re not thinking about the film you should do, you’re thinking too much about the film you think you should do to fulfill those expectations.”
Admirably, Kuosmanen didn’t try to darken the story to give it more festival cache. Instead, he embraced his unique situation. “I felt, personally, that with this setup, I could take some distance from the situation and it would be much easier to laugh at this whole thing.” This brings to mind a lyrical moment in the film in which Olli interrupts another gruelling run when he spots an abandoned kite in a tree – which he simply plucks from the branches and takes for a spin through the forest meadow to bring a moment of bliss back into his life. “I think that was my process for this film,” agrees Kuosmanen when we mention this scene, “to find the joy of filmmaking again and not think about what the others are expecting you to make.”
Another triumph of the film is that rather than feel like a recreation of 1960s Finland, its evocative black and white photography and authentic period detail suggest instead it’s a lost film plucked from that era. Ironically, this authenticity seems to have been born from Kuosmanen’s apathy towards period films in general. “The cinematographer and I, we were not enthusiastic to use all these period piece settings or cars or furniture or clothes; we were not really interested with playing with the decade.”
The flaw many filmmakers make when setting films in the past, Kuosmanen explains, is that they underline the period details. “They tend to base the design on old magazines, and so what you end up with is something that doesn’t look like real life but showhomes out of magazines. In real life, homes in the 60s were full of furniture from the 30s and 40s and 50s, so the decades are always mixed. Our approach was to focus on the people. That way the film feels much more timeless.”
This cock-a-hoop humanist streak aligns The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki with the work of Kaurismäki, but that’s where the similarities end and Kuosmanen has been wise to keep out of the Le Havre director’s considerable shadow. “[Kaurismäki] feeds the idea of Finnish film abroad,” says Kuosmanen, who knows Kaurismäki well from the football pitch. “I love his films, I’m not blaming him, but he has this very strong style and sometimes that’s something you’re expecting about Finnish films. I’m glad we have at least one famous filmmaker, but he’s an outsider in Finland, he’s doing his own stuff.”
His style is impossible to copy, but it seems Kaurismäki’s independent spirit is alive and well in the younger filmmaker. “Aki’s not communicating with the industry in Finland, he’s not teaching in the film schools, so there isn’t anything we can learn from except that he has done his own thing always and that seems to work.”
And it’s worked for Kuosmanen too. While we’ll leave you in suspense as to whether Olli up-ends the odds and triumphs at the end of the film, Kuosmanen’s own story follows the Hollywood underdog formula to a tee. Two weeks after our interview, The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki knocked out the Un Certain Regard competition and took top prize. Kuosmanen's delightful and typically self-effacing response on accepting the award: “Thank you for your weird taste in cinema.”
The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki is released 21 Apr by MUBI and will be available on MUBI in the Spring
The Skinny's film editor, Jamie Dunn, will be introducing a screening of The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki at HOME, Manchester on 21 Apr, 6.15pm – tickets here
Follow Jamie Dunn on Twitter at @JamieDunnEsq