Tuntematon mestari
**½/****
written by Anna Heinämaa
directed by Klaus Härö
by Bill Chambers Olavi (Heikki Nousiainen) looks like Michael Haneke and projects about the same cuddly warmth as an art dealer whose basement shop has never done better than break even. One day at the auction house he frequently trolls, Olavi is caught in the tractor beam of an unsigned portrait of Christ by an unidentified artist, perhaps seeing a vision of his younger self in the bearded figure. He has a hunch the piece is a bigger deal than the viperous auctioneer (Jakob Öhrman) knows, and decides to bid on it with money he'd get from a big resale in a Hail Mary for both his business and his legacy. There's no small irony in that, as he's just allowed his teenage grandson, Otto (Amos Brotherus), to intern for him and in his preoccupation with the painting–attributed, somewhat bewilderingly, to Russian master Ilya Repin despite bearing little resemblance to Repin's actual 1884 portrait of Christ–doesn't quite see the potentially lasting impact he's having on a directionless kid, which is far more profound than scoring "one last deal." Olavi has been estranged from Otto's mother, Lea (Pirjo Lonka), since his wife died. There's a scene where Olavi accepts a longstanding dinner invitation from his daughter just so he can hit her up for a loan and she tries not to show how shattered she is by his obliviousness to her struggles, financial and otherwise, as a single mother while simultaneously impressing upon him that this was the official last straw. The actors are credibly at cross-purposes here and their performances are lovely, but their characters' dynamic is frankly overfamiliar, if not tired; the moment Olavi is stopped short by Lea's voice on his answering machine early on in the picture, this subplot is already over. Surprisingly sentimental for a Finnish movie, One Last Deal is at its most gratifying when it's less "Death of a Salesman", more Roger Dodger, with Olavi teaching Otto unorthodox lessons in survival all but guaranteed to mold him into a miserable and penniless old man possessed of a few arcane skills. It's a relatively engrossing film when it's about a weird job that really didn't need to be dramatically embellished to land as soft tragedy. Programme: Contemporary World Cinema
