Caroline, a fortyish, French architect, is in Vilnius meeting a client, and has to stay on a night longer than expected. She meets thirtyish Finn, Jaakko, they go out drinking and, despite the language barrier, spend the night together. In the morning Caroline dresses quietly and slips from the room, knowing she need never see her one-time lover again.
Except that the Icelandic ash cloud takes a hand, all flights out are cancelled, the hotels are overbooked, and circumstances force her once more into the company of the younger man. So what happens when the participants from a casual drunken encounter are brought together and actually have to try and communicate with each other?
Which sounds like a flimsy pretext for another stereotypical Hollywood romcom, but this film takes conventional film romance tropes and twists them into something much more human. Both characters reveal, sometimes reluctantly, parts of their present, past, and fears for the future. Both spring surprises that alter perceptions of who they are and why they choose to live the lives they do. This is less a case of "will they/won't they", and more a question of who finds most about themselves, and what they might do with those discoveries. The ending might not be the one we'd like to see, but it leaves the audience to figure out which direction these two people might take after their encounter.
Throughout it all there is a questioning of familiar gender role assumptions. It felt like any of the major characters could have swapped gender and still leave the film to work perfectly. Although Finnish in origin, the bulk of the dialogue is in English, with other languages subtitled. And Vilnius, even if much of the action occurs in hotel rooms, is an enjoyably neutral background location, a place of unfamiliar beauty.
French Canadian Marie-Josée Croze is superb as Caroline, so confident in her business life, but a mess of contradictions and uncertainties under the surface. Finn Mikko Nousiainen is a reassuring Jaakko, a man who seems to have his priorities sorted until this stranger upsets his equilibrium.
Well worth a look.
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