Hymyilevä mies
Juho Kuosmanen (2016)
On 17 August 1962, a boxing match took place in Helsinki. The contest for the world featherweight title, between the American Davey Moore, the defending champion, and the challenger Olli Mäki, was the first world championship bout ever to take place in Finland. At an early stage of Juho Kuosmanen’s film about Mäki, his coach-manager Elis Ask tells him the day of the fight will be the happiest day of Olli’s life. Since we already know that Olli has mixed feelings about his big chance and his manager an eye to the main chance, we know this is wishful thinking on Ask’s part – the fight won’t make Olli happy, whatever the result. It’s equally clear what will make him happy: he has recently fallen in love with a girl called Raija. The movie ends with twilight falling on Helsinki on 17 August 1962. Davey Moore has retained his title, on a technical knockout, after only two of the scheduled fifteen rounds. Olli and Raija, who by now have decided to marry, make their way home, quietly and blissfully. As they pass an elderly man and woman walking together, Raija asks Olli, ‘Do you think we’ll be like them when we’re old?’ The two senior citizens are the real Olli and Raija Mäki, still married today, fifty-odd years after the big fight.
Kuosmanen’s first feature (he also wrote the screenplay, with Mikko Myllylahti) has won various prizes and currently has a 100% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, where the ‘Critics’ Consensus’ reads as follows:
‘The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki sidesteps sports biopic clichés with a beautifully filmed, well-acted look at the balance between career fulfillment [sic] and personal happiness.’
Hannah McGill’s review on the BFI website expands on the latter part of that summary, with reference to films about protagonists ambitious for success in artistic as well as sporting endeavour. Citing The Red Shoes and Whiplash, along with Rocky and The Fighter, McGill suggests that:
‘… the notion of necessary sacrifice remains hard for movies to resist – perhaps because filmmaking makes its own disruptive demands; perhaps because audiences enjoy being reminded that the gifted, driven and garlanded get their own share of hardship. When love can be enjoyed, it’s because the lover is a proven boon to the gifted one’s progress … The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki bucks this convention with one bracingly simple suggestion: that finding, being with and caring for the person you love might be more important than running yourself ragged in pursuit of passing glory.’
The picture is beautifully filmed and well acted – by Jarkko Lahti (Olli) and Oona Airola (Raija) anyway – yet I found it irritating, for reasons stemming from a further difference between it and the other films mentioned by McGill: its factual basis. Although this has magnified some of the praise for Olli Mäki, it is, in several ways, a puzzling foundation for a parable about forced, unwanted expectations, in professional sport or beyond. I’d have no problem, in principle, with a fictional piece carrying the moral message that Hannah McGill attributes to this film (except that I’m struggling, in spite of what she says, to think of movies that don’t warn against the perils of single-minded pursuit of sporting success). But in order to make the point using this material Juho Kuosmanen has to distort it. The Moore-Mäki fight must have been a big deal in Finland, and an unusually good payday for Olli, but the film stresses only its artificial and pressurising aspects: a magazine photo shoot, with the pint-sized fighter on a stool in order to appear taller than the glamorous model beside him; an interfering film crew making a documentary about his training. Even allowing that he’s showing things from Olli’s increasingly anxious point of view, Kuosmanen presents a decidedly partial (in more ways than one) account of the fight build-up. He may have been a reluctant national hero but it’s surprising, for example, that the other boxers with whom Olli trains don’t react, either in awe or in envy, to his relative celebrity. (Mäki also had an impressive record as an amateur, winning the 1959 European Lightweight title before turning pro the following year.) Yet he’s just one of the lads, treated by the others with a mild affection that’s almost patronising.
There’s no real sense of Olli’s being subjected to relentless attention wherever he goes. Interest in the world title bout is entirely commercial and metropolitan. Olli and Raija are from the same town of Kokkola. Concerned that her presence is hindering his training, Raija returns home there and Olli temporarily follows; his impending big day in Helsinki isn’t mentioned by anyone in Kokkola. At one point, Elis Ask (Eero Milonoff), exasperatedly trying to gee up the self-effacing, downbeat Olli, makes the reasonable point that he is, after all, a professional sportsman. We’re given no clue as to why Olli became one – the strong implication is that he was happier working as a baker than as a boxer. You’d never guess from the film’s conclusion that the real Olli Mäki continued to fight professionally for more than a decade after 1962, winning the EBU Light Welterweight title in 1964 and holding it for the best part of three years. After retirement from the ring in 1973, he worked as a boxing coach and manager.
Olli is the minnow in the fight with Davey Moore and I guess what also irritates me is the plucky-little-Finland condescension implicit in the critical enthusiasm for it. (The English title, by the way, is different from the Finnish, which translates literally as ‘smiling man’.) The premise of the movie would be derided by self-respecting British reviewers if the story were set in Britain (let alone in America). The black-and-white cinematography by Jani-Petteri Passi is a critical help in a different way. Monochrome does make the film naturally evocative of its period. It also gives it an arty feel that’s likely to reassure critics uneasy about the piece’s simplicity – so that Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian can describe Olli Mäki, photographed in ‘luminous black-and-white’, as ‘drawing inspiration from Scorsese and Truffaut’. Bradshaw substantiates this by likening Olli psychologically to Jake La Motta (‘zoning out in public occasions at the thought of his love’) and physically to Antoine Doinel. Both comparisons are remarkably far-fetched. Peter Bradshaw wouldn’t even have thought of the latter one if the title of the Truffaut film didn’t suggest taking punishment.
Mäki was twenty-six in August 1962. Jarkko Lahti is in his late thirties and looks it but that helps in reinforcing the picture that Juho Kuosmanen wants to convey of Olli as a careworn journeyman whose need for contentment in life is increasingly urgent. Lahti’s likeability in the role goes beyond underdog charm and the extraordinary physical commitment required of him: he also gives Olli a distinctive and engaging blend of solemnity, puzzlement and wry humour. As Raija, Oona Airola, a relative newcomer, is truly lovely – she has an elating naturalness and emotional transparency. The good editing is by Jussi Rautaniemi. Kuosmanen’s repeated cuts from quietness into an explosion of noise – the clash of boxing gloves, the rush of water in the showers after gym training – have impact. The characterisation of Elis Ask is obvious (and doesn’t ‘[sidestep] biopic clichés’), right down to the revelation that this domineering martinet is a henpecked husband. The punchline to an episode in which Elis goes cap in hand to financial backers makes no sense. Olli accompanies him – so too do Elis’s young kids, on his wife’s instructions. When the men leave the meeting, they also leave behind in the house the youngest child, who needed to use the toilet there. Elis might be capable of such negligence but not the conscientious Olli. It’s admittedly unlikely that large numbers of parents will take their children to see a subtitled, black-and-white art-house movie. The title of this one could possibly give the wrong idea, though, and I’m surprised Olli Mäki has a 12A certificate, in view of the sequences describing the desperate, punishing measures to which the hero must resort to get down to the required weight (featherweight is a division below his usual one).
Olli and Raija quickly take their leave from the large formal dinner that follows the climactic, short-lived fight. A shot of Davey Moore (John Bosco Jr) standing alone implies that, in spite of his triumph, Moore too can be ignored by the rest of the company – the managers and money men and people who’ve come to the dinner in order to be seen. I’m not sure whether Kuosmanen means to suggest this is how boxers of the time, including champions, were treated socially or if he’s making a racial point: the African-American Moore is (as I remember this scene) the only black person in evidence. In effect, the image of Moore’s isolation has a different and more specifically unhappy resonance. In his next defence of the world featherweight title, against the Cuban Sugar Ramos in March 1963, the referee stopped the fight before the start of the eleventh round to spare Moore further punishment. The fighter collapsed in the dressing room afterwards and died from a brain injury three days later, without regaining consciousness. As a warning against at-all-costs endeavour in the boxing ring, the true story of Davey Moore is more eloquent than the true story of Olli Mäki.
26 April 2017
