Hyde Park Picture House, Saturday 9 Feb
I always try to avoid reading reviews before seeing a film, but in this case – a rockumentary following a middle aged and learning disabled Finnish punk band – I couldn’t resist. But, in spite of the film picking up several accolades at various film festivals last year, the reviews are fairly thin on the ground, and those that exist are pretty scant in detail. So settling down at Hyde Park Picture House I knew to expect something warts and all, a bit funny, a bit sad, involving a decent four piece punk band made up of two members with autism and two with Down’s syndrome. I expected over the next couple of hours to fill in the back story, and be inspired by an arthouse-ish tale of triumph over adversity. You know the sort: where sentimentality is dressed up in indie clothes that make it ok to be moved to a little tear or two.
Refreshingly, this isn’t quite what played out. The Punk Syndrome is unflinching, unsentimental, and above all unexpected. It’s simply footage: beyond the subtitles, there’s no voiceover or any other attempt to speak for the band members. The camera simply observes from the sidelines, and light touch editing picks out little pieces to string together gentle threads of narrative. The inevitable and unspoken questions we’ve come to expect to find answers to in this kind of documentary are never addressed: what are the men’s disabilities? How did they come to be in this band together? How do their lives differ from ours?
Leaving these questions hanging, filmmakers Jukka Kärkkäinen and Jani-Petteri Passi simply offer us a series of carefully curated snapshots of the four band members lives together and apart, allowing us to draw our own conclusions. Pertti, Kari, Toni and Sami are like any other band with their creative rifts, clashing egos and camaraderie. But there’s an extra dimension stemming from their circumstances: Kari and Sami live in the same group home and are at once best buddies and sick of the sight of each other. Pertti’s low moods can give rise to an anger teetering on violence, which tends to disappear as quickly as it arrived.
The overall effect of these candid, uncensored snapshots is a little uneasy. One moment we’re laughing out loud at Kari’s growled improvised lyrics about an unwanted trip to the pedicurist (“F***ing pedicurists! Why do they even exist?”), the next we’re uneasy in the echoes of our laughter as his growls turn to anguish, and the pedicurist becomes a symbol of his frustration at the dependent world his disability traps him within. Until, beautifully, the tension is cut with Kari’s trip to the pedicurist, and his irrepressible giggles as her treatment tickles his feet.
All of these domestic scenes are of course interspersed with footage of the band onstage. And, true to the hype, they’re pretty good. Their lyrics are a ramshackle and perfect expression of their railing against a discriminatory and unfair society: punk boiled down to its purest essence.
The Punk Syndrome is on limited release in the UK now, and you can pre-order the DVD over at Amazon. There are rumours of a UK tour coming soon too – watch the website for news.