Ruusujen aika (A Time of Roses). 1969. Finland. Directed by Risto Jarva. Screenplay by Jarva, Jaakko Pakkasvirta, Peter von Bagh. With Arto Tuominen, Ritva Vepsä, Tarja Markus. 35mm print courtesy of KAVI (Finnish Film Archive). In Finnish; English subtitles. 108 min.
With more than a soupçon of Antonioni, Godard, and Hitchcock, Risto Jarva imagines the future Finland of 2012 as a classless, techno-fetishistic society. Peter von Bagh, the late and much lamented Finnish filmmaker, festival director, and historian, contributed to the sci-fi film’s biting screenplay, in which a muckraking journalist obsessively investigates the mysterious life and death of a nude model some 40 years earlier. In Vertigo fashion, the journalist casts a lookalike to play her in his television documentary.