It’s impossible not to think about Lost in Translation and Before Sunrise while watching director Juho Kuosmanen’s charming Grand Prix winner from last year’s starry, heavy-hitting Cannes competition.
Like those much-loved films, Compartment No 6 expands its meet-cute moment into a meaningful encounter. Having boarded a train from Moscow to Murmansk, Laura (Seidi Haarla), a Finnish archaeology student, is dismayed to discover that she’ll be sharing a second-class bunk carriage with a rough-looking Russian miner named Ljoha (Yuriy Borisov). Laura is leaving behind a failing love affair with the older, sophisticated Irina (Dinara Drukarova) and journeying towards ancient petroglyphs in the northwest. She is in no mood for Ljoha’s chain-smoking, sausage-eating drunkenness, and incessant banter. Another Finnish traveller who briefly keeps Laura company dismisses the young buzzcut Russian with the observation that “there must be a factory that makes guys like him somewhere”.
Cinematographer J-P Passi’s deft footwork and clever angles work as a masterclass in shooting against small spaces and large horizons.
Laura’s video camera – and production designer Kari Kankaanpää’s canny late-Soviet details – indicate that we’re in the 1990s, a moment when phone boxes are required to call home and when journeys allow for strange overnight stopovers. Both of these period details help shape a meaningful connection at the heart of the film.
Kuosmanen won Cannes’ Un Certain Regard in 2016 with The Happiest Day In the Life of Olli Maki, a boxing movie inspired by the late Finnish pugilist of the title. That film disobeyed all the punch-the-air rules that typically govern sports movies, just as Compartment No 6 plays with the will-they, won’t-they two-step that defines romantic drama. Working from the 2010 novel by Rosa Liksom, Kuosmanen draws from the genre to platonic effect. Slowly, but surely, Laura and Ljoha form an unlikely bond. Haarla and Borisov demonstrate impeccable timing and expertly tiny movements as they warm up to one another. It’s something like love but without either sex or romance. And it’s a joy to behold.
