Today is the premiere of the biggest Finnish Christmas movie Christmas-story ( Joulutarina ), I had the pleasure of getting invited to the special-guest screening on Wednesday.
I won´t argue ( too much anyway ) about the success of the movie it self, but what surprised me is how people reacted to the fact that it tried to present Santa Claus as a normal human being, a lonely and traumatized boy. In fact, the lead character wasn´t even santa claus, it was a boy/man called Nikolas.
It is an interesting pheonemon when movie doers now-a-days try to make films about superheroes. They quickly come to the conclusion that only when a man is somehow mentally damaged, can he do the things that most superheroes do. Think about Batman. A rich guy who beats bad guys wearing black rubber clothes. Well Santa Claus is not a super hero, but there are lots of similarities to the story and I think the approach has been similar in this case.
A man comes out once a year to deliver presents to children, what kind of man would he be like in reality? I think that the starting point in the story is at least logically true. A lonely ant traumatic child, who misses his parents and sister, who feels obliged to compensate being a burden to the small town whose people are taking care of him, being an orphan. First he gives presents to people who have helped him, later on to all children.
The fact that Nikolas stays in that state, that his madness grows even bigger during the years, is in no way funny or nice, but if we want that he keeps bringing the presents to the children, he must not find happiness in any other way. And trough suffering one becomes a saint, like St. Nicholas. (this is not in the movie, apart from small references and a very odd and symbolic ending of the film).
My point is, that it seems that Santa Claus has more power than we, or at least I think. Everyone hates the Coca-Cola santa, but everyone seems to reject the look of what could be the real santa. The story looks to me like being a basis for the myth that now-a-days surrounds the santa claus thing. This is how stories and myths are born; from some messed up guy, usually a loner who does something out of ordinary.
If the movie had been a tale about a jolly old man with elfs and singing, everyone would have hated it. But now the same people reject this story.
Is Santa Claus really that sacred? That it cannot be viewed from any other point of view? not to me. I think I´ve never had any relationship to santa. I hear that I was afraid of him when I was younger. But it is really funny that in our freedom of speech, liberal and politically-incorrect, nothing-is-sacred-kind of time, santa claus still holds his position of an icon, not to be changed.
The movie has many problems, I think it deals with the subject too lightly, superficially, even for a children movie. Children movies can be more scary than grownups seem to think. That kind of scary and dark stories are what affected me most when I was a kid. The movie is too fast, there is no space to breath and get in to the emotion.. Things like this. Acting is poor from time to time, even tough the lead man was good all the time. music was good but it increased the feel of the movie being "ahead of emotion" so the viewer was forced to feel, which is bad. But if there was something good, I think it was exactly this point, this what someone calls a Finnish way of looking life; melancholic and lonely life, of santa.
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