Imaginaerum

What a great weekend! It's lovely to have some freetime once in a while. Since we didn't have our lesson on Friday (I hope the little guy is getting better by now) I spent the day doing my backlog and that was pretty much everything I did during the day. Because of the hard work on Friday I gave myself an opportunity to do something nice during the weekend... So we went to the cinema!  The film was in English, of course, but the director is Finnish. I think you guessed already? Yes, it was Imaginaerum, a new film based on Nightwish's new album with the very same name.

My husband is a fan of the band and I had nothing against it when he said that he would be interested in seeing the film. It wasn't bad after all... But it was quite scary! Imaginaerum is a film about an old man, Tom, who stays in the hospital, unconscious. While he sleeps he travels back in time to his childhood as an orphan, then to his youth as an artist, and then finally to his late days when he realises all the mistakes he has made during the journey. This old man has somekind of dementia and in his dream world he keeps trying to put things back together, to remember his family members and pieces about his own history. The illness, has a figure of a snowman (a scary snowman) and Tom has to fight against him and try to escape as well as he can.

There's another level of the story where Tom's daughter tries to survive in her own life, tries to forget her father and forgive him for all the mistakes he has done during her childhood. We are let to know that Tom wasn't actually a good father but very much the opposite. He had a bad temper and he spent his days playing the piano and touring with his band. Now as an adult Tom's daughter is full of anger and disappointment towards her father. It's a last chance for Tom to beg for his daughter's forgiveness...

Imaginaerum is a strange film! It treats the same kind of topics that Finnish films so often do. For example, it tells about problematic father relationships (on two levels: Tom's father committed suicide which made him a bad father), generation gap, childhood traumas etc. Sounds pretty depressing, huh? But still Imaginaerum doesn't seem like an ordinary Finnish film. The story is told with music and actually this kind of dark and cranky themes match quite well with Nightwish's strange lyrics and dark melodies. Or can you imagine a super positive film made about Nightwish? That would be scary!

Besides the music there's another strange level in the film. It's a self-portrait of the band's figurehead. I wonder if it's an accident that Tuomas Holopainen himself plays the role of the young Tom, and it's interesting how similar his and Tom's lives as an artist seem in the film... We can only guess how much there is of Tuomas inside the character! Imaginaerum is a strange mix of dark music, gothic and carnivalistic elements and a split of North American film tradition (the film was produced by Finns and Canadians). Somehow it also reminds me about Japanese anime tradition... What an odd film indeed!

It was a shock to realise we have to write a review of our independent work before next Thursday. It's hard to realise we are in the end of November already! Time goes so fast... Soon it's Christmas! I shall write a review of my independent work next week and also place my idiosyncratic dictionary here. I even feel sad that this blog is coming to it's end in a couple of weeks. During this autumn I got used to it already. From now on it's going to be just thesis everyday... What else can I say? Thanks for the advice in the beginning of the course! Maybe I'll start a new literary blog in 2013!