It’s all about perspective…

In many ways, the film festival experience is like speed dating or travelling alone.  It sets you up for a myriad of experiences that you honestly couldn’t have even anticipated.

In theatres now, Compartment No. 6 is that kind of experience as it’s a subtle but truly unique and beautiful look at the magic of human connection and how truly unpredictable it all truly is.

A young Finnish woman escapes an enigmatic love affair in Moscow by boarding a train to the arctic port of Murmansk. Forced to share the long ride and a tiny sleeping car with a larger than life Russian miner, the unexpected encounter leads the occupants of Compartment No. 6 to face major truths about human connection.

We’ll be the first to admit that there’s nothing in the story that is exactly shifting the landscape of storytelling in any kind of seismic way, but that’s kind of the point.  Co-Writer/Director Juho Kuosmanen does something with subtlety and nuance that never gets the appreciation it deserves these days.  He made something that is familiar feel fresh and emotionally evocative.

Using a lot of handheld shots getting us into the thick of the story, Kuosmanen is stripping away the artifice of genre and making this something about people at their very cores.  It’s not the prettiest film, but it allows some moments of genuine honest to shine through making it less about some forced unexpected romance but more about the appreciation of the people that we all meet in our lives that we never actually expected to.

The remote landscapes of Russia make the perfect backdrop for our heroine who is running from her experiences in Moscow as more of a self-defence mechanism then anything.  While she didn’t necessarily want to go anywhere, she subconsciously knew that she was turning the page in her book of life and really had no clue where the next chapter was going to go.

Kuosmanen allows us to bathe in this feeling thanks to the tone of the film, which relished in its uncertainty for every frame and while it’s easier said than done most times in films like this, it worked because our two lead actors were just 100% in tune with the material that was in front of them.  This wasn’t a love story; this was a life story that demands we acknowledge the moment rather than try to extrapolate something else out of it.

Finnish actress Seidi Haarla is a marvel here as her Laura finds the kind of world weary loneliness that we have almost forgotten still actually exists in the world.  She draws us in as her journey away from what she knew ultimately allows her to find herself again.  There’s a stern yet vulnerable sense to her performance that is hard to find with actors who only have 8 screen credits to her name but she brings us a ride here that makes me as a film fan only want to see her in more and more things.

Yuriy Borisov masterfully plays the other side of the coin here as the wild and free Ljoha.  She’s quiet and reserved while he’s a freewheeling maverick.  On paper they couldn’t be any more different but as these actors go back and forth we see them strip themselves down so we can see their insecurities and flaws which is truly what unites us.  These two are drawn to each other, not out of any romantic leanings but out of pure intellectual fascination at what the other person was and what they represent.

At the end of the day, Compartment No. 6 will draw comparisons to the love story of Before Sunrise which is somewhat apt but this film goes for more than that.  It’s a truly humanistic story that wants us to appreciate the pure electricity of human connection, even when it makes no obvious sense.  In a world where we’ve all been apart, this reminds us how fun and genuine life affirming it can be when we all get to be together.