The Beauty of Errors marks the seventh time that Finnish director Jukka Kärkkäinen has worked with his close friend, Tero Pihkakoski. “For me, it’s easy to make films with Tero because he knows what to expect.” One of these was the 2009 documentary, The Living Room of a Nation, made when Tero had recently become a father to Henri.
Now, Henri is a young adult. Tero himself is in early middle age and has put on a bit of weight. He loves his son dearly but is a single dad with an idiosyncratic approach to parenthood. He is happy to teach Henri how to repair a car or shoot a gun. At times, though, when Tero has had too much beer, it seems that Henri is the one doing the looking after, rather than the other way around.
“I think he [Tero] is a good father. He is very present when he is with his son Henri. In the film, you see a few days when he is drinking – but he is not drinking all the time. The movie is just one and a half hours of their life – and we have shot, like, five years,” Kärkkäinen counters.
The director acknowledges that Tero has his dark moments – but so does he. “I think he is some kind of mirror image of me. We are getting more and more sad every year…maybe life is just difficult for people like us. When we are happy, we are really happy. When we are sad, we are really, really sad,” Kärkkäinen strikes a philosophical note.
Put it to the filmmaker that Tero seems like a character from one of Aki Kaurismaki’s more deadpan comedies and he doesn’t entirely disagree. “Yeah, yeah, I can see that Tero is similar to Kaurismaki characters – but maybe Tero is talking more. Tero talks a lot.”
The documentary (in International Competition in Thessaloniki and sold by Rise and Shine) is shot in very distinctive style, with tableau-like sequences in which the characters are seen in front of an unmoving camera.
“I found out this style already 20 years ago when I watched films [by] like Roy Andersson or Ulrich Seidl, and I started to think – can I do the same with documentary films?” Kärkkäinen explains his unusual approach to framing.
Several scenes show father and son in the car together. These were filmed with the camera rigged on the hood of the vehicle. (Sometimes the director would be hidden behind the car seats doing the sound recording – and sometimes the filmmakers wouldn’t be present at all).
This isn’t just a father and son story. It’s a father, son…and dog film. Often seen at the kitchen window, imploring to be let in, is Tero’s pet canine, Yuri (named after the cosmonaut). “When I started to make this movie, the dog was quite annoying,” the director admits. “The dog didn’t like me at all.”
Thankfully, when more money came in and he was able to hire Toni Pasanen as his cinematographer, the dog left him alone and began to target Pasanen instead.
The dog features in arguably the film’s most controversial scene when it is shown sharing a dish of liver casserole with Tero. The issue here is that Tero puts mustard on the liver. “No-one in Finland puts mustard there,” Kärkkäinen can’t hide his surprise and dismay at the way his friend garnishes one of the country’s national dishes.
Alongside the dog, the film has some other important supporting characters among them Tero’s elderly parents and Henri’s new girlfriend.
“For me, I think the grandfather and grandmother are the bone and the heart of the family. They take care of Henri and Tero. Actually, the grandmother is taking care of all of the guys. She is the soul of this little family in the middle of nowhere.”
When the girlfriend came into the story, Henri was so smitten by her that he stopped even noticing he was being filmed by a documentary crew. “The girl was really shy and so we only shot the film when it was OK with them…”
Even with these limitations, Kärkkäinen and his team had 71 days of material. The footage from the car on its own lasted for 22 hours. So, yes, there was a lot of editing.
The Beauty of Errors is a comeback movie for Kärkkäinen, a cult figure in Finnish cinema who stopped making films for four or five years after The Punk Voyage (2017). “I somehow retired,” he says.
In recent years, the director claims, he has been working instead as a fork lift truck driver at a local fruit and vegetable warehouse – and he has been busy free-skiing in his spare time.
He’d often drop in to see Tero and Henri who live “somewhere between Helsinki and Lapland.” The father and son talked sometimes about going to Rome or the Far East, but they also made it clear that they hated being away from home. “Suddenly, I realised that my own daughter is the same age as Henri…and I don’t understand anything about teenage life. Then I thought maybe I will start to make a film again.”
Juha Löppönen came on board as producer for the project, made through Mouka Filmi (the company co-owned by Löppönen, Kärkkäinen and Sami Jahnukainen).
The film eventually became a co-production between Finland, Norway and Sweden, with Indie Film (Norway) and Auto Images (Sweden) as partners. Broadcasters Arte, SVT and YLE also came on board.
The Beauty of Errors will be released in Finnish cinemas on the 2nd of April. PEK is handling the release. It’s also expected to surface at various other festivals in the spring and summer. Mouka Filmi has also recently co-produced two other new docs, The Curse of Kane and The Smuggler (both of which screen in Thessaloniki)
Like Danish director Lars Von Trier, Kärkkäinen has a fear of flying. That means he will have to take the long way round to get to Thessaloniki in time for his premiere. He’s driving by car and will pick up Norwegian director August B. Hanssen (from The Curse Of Kane) en route.
Having now made his comeback with The Beauty of Errors, Kärkkäinen already has some other new projects on the boil. One, Another Beautiful Day Mrs K [working title], is about his mother living alone and yearning for her late husband. Another film, 44 Names Without Thinking is about homeless alcoholics. This is using material shot more than a decade ago. Its title refers to one of the homeless characters who was asked how many of his friends had died because of drink. He came up with 44 names without even having to think.
Kärkkäinen may be directing again but he continues to drive the fork lift truck at weekends. “I still love it so much. It’s like therapy for me,” he says of his double life as movie director and warehouse worker.
