29/03/2022 - Finnish director Einari Paakkanen really makes you want to sing along throughout his sweet, touching film

It’s hard to get down to properly reviewing a film if you were grinning stupidly through most of it, but that’s probably just Karaoke Paradise [+see also:
trailer
interview: Einari Paakkanen
film profile]’s charm: it’s sweet, it’s touching, and it actually makes you believe there is not a single unpleasant person to be found in the whole of Finland.

Einari Paakkanen’s patchwork of a doc, now screening at CPH:DOX, goes through multiple protagonists and different stories quite quickly, all united by one, single fact: these people really seem to like karaoke. It’s not exactly a shocker – the Finnish passion for it is actually rather well known, if still a bit odd, much like their love for tango. There was even an odd little mockumentary about it, too (Viviane Blumenschein’s Midsummer Night’s Tango), which saw one Aki Kaurismäki claiming, poker face and all, that it’s his home country that should be celebrated for it, not Argentina. But we digress.

To say that this documentary is a bit all over the place would be fair, but that’s also because it’s a road movie. One character, an experienced karaoke hostess, literally drives from one place to another, setting up the equipment and recounting her many lively encounters with drunks or raccoons, or just about every other animal this beautiful, cold country has to offer. “I watch people,” she says, interested in what happened to all of her customers in the past. It’s a crucial statement because karaoke comes off as a public therapy session. It cures heartbreak, loneliness, shyness – all of it, apparently. There is even a chance to win a trip to Tokyo, a subplot that brought back surprisingly vividly memories of a 2000 Gwyneth Paltrow karaoke movie also revolving around a big competition – the one where she sang “Cruisin’” with Huey Lewis, and it actually made the charts. 2000 was an odd year. But we digress again.

Paakkanen, who previously delivered the equally touching, if a tad more personal, My Father from Sirius [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Einari Paakkanen
film profile], doesn’t really care if his protagonists know how to sing or if they can hold onto those whistled notes. Based on some of the translations alone, their local songs are really quite something, but it’s not Finland’s Got Talent – these are stories about unassuming people dealing with their own problems. It could be a serious disease, the kind of loss that rips your heart out, or it could be a simple desire for a partner. There is a man who insists on being called “The Beast of the Woods” in his dating ad, complaining that “women won’t come to his garage or the woods, so he has to go to public places”. Someone should talk to him, and soon, and explain a few things.

Poland’s Paweł Łoziński, the director of the absolutely wonderful The Balcony Movie [+see also:
film review
interview: Paweł Łoziński
film profile], recently said that his film, full of random conversations with so-called “normal” people, was about the need to be noticed sometimes, to be fished out from the crowd – even for a short exchange about the meaning of life. If that’s the case, Karaoke Paradise is its spiritual cousin. “There is a little diva inside of everyone,” someone says here. Which is why, every once in a while, you just gotta ignite the light, and let it shine, just own the night, like the 4th of July. At least according to famed philosopher Katy Perry.

Karaoke Paradise was produced by Finland’s napafilms oy.