Six years ago, Kuosmann knocked on the door of Cannes with his debut film "Oli's Happiest Day", winning the Grand Prix in the Un Certain Regard category. The Finnish director seems to have a soft spot for narratives that cross genres. The last one was a crossover from sports to romance. This new work, "Car No. 6," is a hybrid model of road film and melodrama, focusing on exploring the two. intimacy between strangers. The story follows a Finnish woman who, to escape a secret romance in Moscow, boards a train to the Arctic port of Murmansk. She was forced to spend a long journey in a cramped sleeping car with a Russian miner. Although many people compare the film to the Russian long-distance train version of "Love Before Dawn", and the story also focuses on the dialogue between the two on the train, but in my opinion, the hero and heroine are not love, but It is a special relationship between love and friendship.
However, this flat and moving story is not set in the era of epidemic isolation, but in the late 1990s, but how to break the relationship between people is still the theme shared by the two films. This work does not need the low-level weight of "sympathizing with each other", but with the simple background of the carriage, it is enough to show the changes in the relationship between two strangers in a believable and touching way. The hero and heroine concealed their true identities from each other at first. The heroine thought she had the upper hand with her knowledge (archaeology major, camera), but she did not expect that after a series of unexpected events, she began to discover subtle changes in her situation and identity. .
This ingenious script takes advantage of the two train stops on the way, and the two get off the train, not only to provide substantial reasons for the heroine's transformation from psychology to behavior (first a phone call to break the heroine's relationship fantasy about her lover, and then a visit to the male lead) The protagonist's mother's house quickly developed empathy with the male protagonist), and also waved away the monotonous and boring atmosphere of traditional road films, moving from a claustrophobic small carriage to an open outdoor space, which also implies the heroine's mood and emotions. Let go of your lofty loneliness and get ready to take on the journey with your approachable true face. The most outstanding is the anti-climax suspense design. The rock painting that has been drawing the minds of the heroine and the audience from beginning to end is not very attractive at all, but the performance of the two when they are trapped in a blizzard when they return is even better. Accident. They were like two innocent children fighting and playing in the ice and snow. They put aside their psychological grudges and class attributes and returned to the most primitive and pure relationship.
Like the debut work, the director does an excellent job of restoring the retro background. In the 1990s, when cell phones and electronics were nowhere to be seen, audio tapes and outdoor phone booths were notable, and the relationship between strangers couldn’t be more appropriate in this context. Both of Kuosmann's films have chosen a turbulent era (Finland in the 1960s and Russia in the late 1990s) without much ambition to dabble in grand historical, political and social issues. This work succeeds in accurately capturing the psychology of people craving for communication under the emptiness and loneliness. This idea has become quite rare in today's Internet age, because there are various network communication tools and software. Therefore, seeing the hero's act of taking the heroine to the destination to watch the rock paintings despite all odds, an indescribable emotion emerged unconsciously; in the end, the letter from the hero to the heroine read the phrase "I x you" ”, which pushes this emotion to the extreme. Is it love between the two? Unlikely, this kind of relationship that transcends friendship and is not love is temporarily established between two lonely souls. This is a kind of human emotional instinct that can resonate with each other by giving selflessly and asking for nothing in return.