A Time of Roses

2012: Raimo Lappalainen is wary of his society, which believes in science as the answer to everything, even the imponderables of history. He begins to investigate the life of a certain Saara who died in the mid-1970s in a car accident and who’d made a living from appearing in films and on stage, sometimes dressed and often not. He finds a girl called Kisse to play Saara – this, as everybody knows who’s ever read Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte (1892) and/or seen Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), will end in despair. Yes, this is now the year of A Time of Roses, and it’s terrifying to see how precisely Risto Jarva, Jaakko Pakkasvirta and Peter von Bagh predicted all our failings and stupidities – not of our everyday lives, but of the body politic, not to mention the soul. A gem of science fiction cinema which takes its philosophical-sociopolitical dimension more seriously than most exercises in this particular genre.

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