Review by Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Alli Haapasalo
Starring: Marketta Tikkanen, Jakob Ohrman, Alma Poysti, Aamu Milnoff, Krista Kosonen, Noora Dadu
For a once every month phenomena which half the population either has, had or will experience, people are so weird about menstruation. It starts in school, where in generations past pubescent girls had a special assembly to be informed about the forthcoming biological progression, with no boys allowed. It's a tricky one: I suppose girls first need to get their own heads around their bodies ticking towards a decades long cyclical inconvenience without the askance looks of immature boys, but shrouding what is a natural aspect of human biology in mystery and associative shame is surely not healthy or helpful. Then male-controlled religion compounds the taboo with its nutty little guidelines. To wit, if a woman has "issues" (the hilarious King James euphemism for the shedding of the uterine lining) then "she shall be put apart seven days" (this is from Leviticus, mind, which I am convinced is the most misunderstood book ever written. It just has to be a mad parody of tyrannical law: by the time you get to the guidelines forbidding eating insects, wearing mixed fabrics or trimming your beard it is clear that Moses/ the Levite priests are taking the St. Michael). More isolation, more disgrace. It's been said before, but if men had periods you could bet we'd be flexing the fuck out of our flow, boasting about the thickness etc (because everything is competition with us, let's be real), yet girls are encouraged to keep quiet and couch what's happening in stuffy code; "my monthlies," "Aunt Flo." Even in their most misogynist pomp I've not heard a manosphere twerp bring it up: a signal of their unapproachable fear of female biology, I reckon. In fact, the only subset who will speak openly about the occurrence are the TERFs, with their last-card gotcha that only "real women" menstruate. What a bleeding awful state of affairs.
Menses as stick to beat women with is the narrative trigger of Alli Haapasalo's (writer Katja Kallio) wondrous period drama Tell Everyone, wherein at the turn of the twentieth century Amanda (Marketta Tikkanen) is confined to a remote sanatorium island for "troublesome" women. We open on a shot framed like a Casper David Friedrich painting: the subject pictured from the back, bearing witness to the overwhelming scenes unfolding. In this instance it's the Baltic sea, tearing away from a passenger boat as a woman in a resplendent Victorian fashion of wide brimmed straw hat, thick bird-egg-blue coat and mauve umbrella watches her old life recede. It could be hopeful, if not for the fact that she is actually handcuffed to the railings. The hospice where she is being sent to has the mien of a utilitarian hotel, and, following a near comic litany of Amanda's apparently bad behaviour (she didn’t "get on with her mother," she "travelled," she "was jailed during the town fair in fear of disturbance"-!) it transpires that Amanda has been sent to the sanatorium due to extreme period cramps, and that she is a "menstrual maniac." Show me a woman who isn't, (eh lads, etc): not my words, but the defiant riposte of Amanda herself. Haapasalo's film becomes an exposé of patriarchal subjugation, with the island's populace victim survivors of mandated cultural expectation and constraints.
What ensues is a typical Randle McMurphy narrative (now there's a load of misogynist tut), with Amanda negotiating the softly draconian statutes of the sanitorium and inspiring her fellow patients to actualise with varying degrees of success. However, unlike the brutality which usually typifies this sort of film, Tell Everyone's storytelling is poignantly serene. It helps that the bucolic surroundings ameliorate the authoritarian mien of the hospital: frankly, being shut away on a Scandinavian island with a bunch of women who have a bit of a pep in their step, and who share their amazing dresses, is surely most peoples' idea of heaven. It's the inescapable, Kafka-esque enforcement that grinds Amanda down. "God created me to be no man's maid," she coolly states in a line that would still be cold today, but back then would have people reaching for their pearls in terror. Instructively, an early sequence sees the inmates shower together in a matter of fact wide-shot which displays a diverse range of naked female bodies as is. With no sensationalising or embarrassment, the film informs us of the reality of the female body and positions us to accept it.
The moment is characteristic of Tell Everyone's calm maturity, which doesn't lean into hyperbole and prioritises above par performances (heartbreakingly beautiful and inscrutable, Tikkanen is ace) and carefully constructed moments. Confessing as to why she is on the island, a younger patient (Aamu Milonoff) tells of how she was raped, impregnated and how, when the baby was born, she "pushed its face into the moss" to smother it; the pragmatic recount is juxtaposed by the arcadian beauty of the surroundings. And sorry to lower the tone, but if you're into the Scandi-porn of woollen outfits, candle lit wooden interiors and impossibly blue waterscapes, then there's plenty to swoon at in this Finnish mise-en-scene. Amanda's gorgeous wardrobe (via costume designer Anna Vilppunen) even becomes a symbol of quiet rebellion and friendship. She weeps when a package of her clothes arrives - dresses of purple silk, ruby red wool - yet apportions them to her fellow patients; "this lavender would look so good on you" (not to make everything about gender, but I think the main difference between men and women is that we never swap clothes). It is lovely.
The final act, predicated on a time jump and a compromised haircut, doesn't quite maintain the naïve charm of the earlier film, but this development, I imagine, is telling in and of itself of the lived experience of real life Amandas (there is also an oddly incongruous part where a nymphomaniac - another gendered term - teaches Amanda to make sex faces and it looks like that ahegao face that Gen Z do for lols-?). We end with Amanda again looking upon events unfolding before her, although this time the camera plays off her smiling face as she recognises hope for future generations.
