By Kohinoor Dasgupta
(Originally published on May 13, 2011 in my weblog Draupadiarjun)
Letters to Father Jacob (Postia Pappi Jaakobille), the 2009 Finnish movie, has won many awards, notably the Golden Pyramid for Best Film at the Cairo International Film Festival in November 2009. It was Finland’s Oscar entry in the Best Foreign Film category in 2010, the year India sent the Marathi film Harishchandrachi Factory.
Director Klaus Härö tightened Jaana Makkonen’s original script to create this 75-minute-long feature.
Veteran Finnish stage and television actor Heikki Nousiainen is old Father Jacob who lives alone in a village parsonage, a really old building. A succession of priests, whose framed black and white portraits hang in the hall, lived here and left behind traces of their solitary lives. The photograph of a much younger Father Jacob is the last one in the row, which suggests he grew old in this place. However, the letters from strangers that he’s been answering for years seem to have followed him around on other postings as well. The addresses on the envelopes don’t all look the same. It’s a charm of the movie for me that everything is not explained. Who are the letter writers? How do they know of Father Jacob? Do all priests receive intercession letters? Is Father Jacob unique in that he receives so many letters that he’s begun to regard them as evidence of his modest usefulness in God’s design?
There’s a grove of silver birch trees to the right of the house. On good-weather days, the blind priest likes to have his mail read and answered there, in the tranquility inlaid with natural sounds. He often raises his unseeing eyes to the sky and even changes in the light don’t escape his refined senses. A neighbor used to read him his mail but she’s indefinitely away at a city hospital. The letters have piled up and a new personal assistant arrives.
She is Leila Sten, a physically intimidating, youngish woman who’s been pardoned after serving twelve years of a life sentence. Her freedom hasn’t made Leila happy; she was on her own atonement trip at prison and feels cheated out of it by a busybody priest’s ego-boosting interference. Writer, controversial columnist and actor Kaarina Hazard plays Leila in an example of great casting. Leila’s powerful, almost masculine physique has always influenced her experience of life, like it had Minette Walters’ “sculptress” (played by Pauline Quirke in the BBC adaptation), but just a little way into our acquaintance with Leila we understand she’s also a perceptive woman with a wry sense of humor.
They make an odd pair, the priest and the pardoned killer. Father Jacob is taller, but he is frail, his face tired, his blind eyes alight with the intensity of his inner life. His long fingers clasp the worn Bible that he has possessed since he was a child. Leila is rosy-cheeked, arrogantly aware of her physical strength. She licks the postage stamps in a deliberately repulsive way, swings the breadknife at Father Jacob to test his blindness; she bullies the postman, regards her world with cynicism, and the priest as an anachronistic freak. The dripping roof of the parsonage infuriates her; the time spent outdoors in the silver birch grove where Father Jacob seems made of grass, bark, sunshine, wind, scent, chlorophyll and earth, is for Leila as much time spent in a cage as any other.
Hindu philosophy says a human being is reborn as many times as he or she needs to get rid of the last speck of grime that stains his/her soul. Only then is the soul ready to find its eternal home in the divine soul. When I watched Letters to father Jacob, it seemed to me as though there was one other important character in the movie, the God piety creates in mortal life. Father Jacob tells Leila that he takes the intercession letters to heart because people need to think that someone’s watching over them. The film conveys the impression, with Haro’s subtle direction and Tuomo Hutri’s brilliant photography, that someone infinitely loving is watching over both Father Jacob and his unwilling helper.
The priest’s shadow flits across the crucifix in the hall both when he is waiting for Leila to arrive and when he’s put on the teakettle at the end. One of Finland’s heritage churches, the medieval Holy Cross Church at Hattula, is used as the interior of the church where Father Jacob once officiated at weddings and baptisms. Its venerable roof (on film) has holes as well, but the raindrops falling on Father Jacob’s eyes lead him home where Leila is preparing to run from life. As I was saying, Leila’s harsh, stolid realism (“Not too many burdened minds today,” she says when Father Jacob is teken aback to learn that not many letters have come one day – after Leila has dropped a handful in the well. “Nobody’s going to die if they don’t” she retorts scornfully another time when Father Jacob reveals that he chooses to stay on at the parsonage because he isn’t sure his correspondents would find him if he moves) strips from Father Jacob his last vain hope – that he is an instrument of God’s mercy and love. After the letters dry up, he tells Leila, “I thought I was doing all this for Him… but maybe it was the other way around. Maybe it was all for me. Maybe it was His way of holding onto me. Of leading me home.” But only the part of that hope that was made of vanity was taken away - so that the hope that was based on Father Jacob’s truthful spiritual experience would not be in vain. The unkempt, stumbling old man in his pajamas, so different from the neat, precise man we meet at the beginning, nevertheless has a spring in his step and, as my daughter would say, his bestest smile, when Liisa Sten’s letters are answered at last.
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