Nobody does it like the Finns. Maybe singing is in their soul. Maybe they have more to sing about than others. Whatever the reason, when the opportunity arises they will take it, giving voice to their favourite songs, publicly and with a backing track and performed with passion and vigour – if not always with aplomb.
“You can have somebody sing the best party song ever. And the next person who comes can sing the most melancholic song of all time,” explains director Einari Paakkanen of the range of voices, moods and emotions in evidence in his feature doc Karaoke Paradise. “So it kind of goes up and then goes really deep down, and then back up again. That’s what I wanted to bring to the film.”
That said, most of the characters we meet in Karaoke Paradise have a default setting of melancholia, such as Laura who has recently lost a child and Elina who has developed Parkinson’s disease. Both responded to an ad placed online for potential stories.
“They both wrote such heartbreaking messages, and so deep,” comments Paakkanen. “I could see for both of them the meaning of karaoke, and their pain. Laura losing her baby had just recently happened. And she’s saying I’m trying to sing to kind of forget it. Then Elina was saying that singing kind of makes her forget that she has [Parkinson’s]. And for [the duration of] that song, she’s normal again, you know, whatever normal means.”
Not to say that Karaoke Paradise is in any way a depressing film. Far from it. It rattles along at a great pace, telling its personal stories and punctuated by sometimes great, always full-throated, performances.
And it is very funny as well, as evidenced by single father Kari who, when not running his karaoke car repair shop, is doling out toe-curling ‘dad-like’ advice to his teenager daughter on matters such as contraception. The director found Kari when surfing the net for inspiration. “In my research, I googled ‘karaoke laundry’ and ‘karaoke hotel’ and ‘karaoke police force.’ I tried all different Google karaokes, whatever came to my mind. And then I typed ‘karaoke car repair shop,’ and then suddenly I got a hit,” he enthuses.
Then there is Evi, the grande dame of Finnish karaoke with the saddest of eyes, who delivers happiness and succour in equal measure to patrons via her mobile karaoke unit. She is a woman with a tough back story who understands the needs and the psyche of her audience, and is herself prone to lachrymose response, especially when visiting care homes. What would have happened had she been placed in a better foster home, she asks rhetorically in the film. Who knows, but she certainly wouldn’t have the millions of friends she has now, she answers.
At first, Paakkanen was fearful that the documentary would confirm the prejudicial cliché of drunks in a bar belting out unrecognizable versions of hit songs. But Evi exploded that myth. Their first phone call lasted three hours when she told him the story of her life and of her dedication to Finnish karaoke. And she gave him four reasons why people sing. First that they are lonely. Secondly that they are ill. Thirdly that they have lost somebody, and fourthly that they are in love and desperate to sing about. “So that was my starting point,” says the director.
In the film Evi says that there’s a little bit of diva in each of us. It’s a truth that Paakkanen came to understand. “Yeah, we all want to be seen and heard and Finnish karaoke [offers this] for three minutes. Everybody sees you and hears you and you get applauded…We have this little paradise in a dark pub in a cold land where people don’t have to excel. People accept you. [Performers] don’t have to be perfect and they still get applauded. I mean, that’s in a society that really looks for perfection.”
Paakkanen tells how the film evolved, exceeding “the humble ideas I had in the beginning” and transitioned into a document that explains the human condition as well as any piece of art, whether on celluloid or otherwise. He also thanks ‘filmmaker’s luck’ for a number of sequences, such as when his camera was set up in a bar with little prospect of anything meaningful to shoot, at which point a random man arrives to tell the heart-rending story of the post-divorce suicide of his best friend. Paakkanen describes such moments as like “winning the lottery.”
Karaoke Paradise will have a second screening during CPH:DOX at Absalon Bar which will also host an open mic competition the same evening. Of course the director will be in attendance, but what will be his song of choice when it’s his turn to take the stage. Stand By Me is his immediate response, the great Ben E. King standard, a song of longing and sublime simplicity that touches the heart of all melancholics.
