Four Women (1942) | The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog
A caption in a newspaper in 1938 causes unexpected ructions when its editor Marja Kauria (Helena Kara) lists herself as the daughter of the late philanthropist Walter Timelius (Hugo Hytönen). His spinster sister Agda (Salli Karuna) marches down to the editorial office to demand a retraction. Marja, however, sticks to her guns, and announces that she is, indeed, Timelius’ secret daughter.
A series of flashbacks reveal the whole story – that in 1914, Marja was the product of an affair between Walter and his housekeeper, Iida (Emma Väänänen). Refusing to marry Walter, Iida instead accepts a proposal two year later from the artist Eemel (Oiva Luhtala), who dies in 1927 after the couple have a son, Marja’s half-brother Ville (Lauri Mehto). When Walter dies in 1931, he leaves a large sum of money to Iida, and his family agree to sweep the matter under the carpet.
Marja develops a strong attraction to Hans Timelius (Olavi Reimas), her cousin. Aunt Agda does everything she can to keep the pair apart, eventually funding Hans’s postgraduate research in America in order to keep him away from her. Eventually, when she discovers that Marja and Hans are still keeping in touch, she confronts Marja, claiming that Hans is not her cousin, but her half-brother, yet another illegitimate child of Walter, who had been adopted by his relatives. This however, is not true, because Hans is really Agda’s son, born of a liaison with an artist (it’s always an artist) and adopted by family members to spare her blushes. Finally, Marja and Hans are reunited, and all is… er… well…
Well, I should say, marrying your cousin is not the brightest of ideas, particularly in Finland where it appears to happen rather often. Your correspondent can only imagine yet another time-jump, this time to an allergy-prone Finnish milksop in the 21st century, complaining through his sneezes that his family had a lot of consanguinity in it.
Preserving the pointlessly complex flashbacks and time-jumps of Seere Salminen’s original 1938 stage play, the production of Neljä naista was disrupted by the Continuation War, so much so that scripted summery activities had to be switched for skiing and snowball fights. But there’s no accounting for taste – the Finnish press loved it, and was even prepared to forgive the scatty structure.
Helena Kara is strikingly strong-willed and confident as Marja, in what would be her last film role with Suomi-Filmi before she defected to Suomen Filmiteollisuus with her husband, the director Hannu Leminen.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films, so you don’t have to.
