LOVE IS A TREASURE

You will feel the chill of insanity during LOVE IS A TREASURE, whose deceptively benign title masks an omnibus of surreal vignettes drawn from interviews with women afflicted by mental illness. With fierce performances from her ensemble of girls interrupted, and startling trompe d'oeil imagery, filmmaker Eija-Liisa Ahtila evokes the warped logic of dementia, conjuring demons of the mind. A paranoiac in an institution escapes nonexistent assassins by hiding under her bed, and maps out elaborate techniques for this strategy. A daughter unloved by her mother finds solace and self-esteem instead by acting as “ground control” liaison for a fleet of friendly (and oddly familiar) flying saucers on a mission to save the Earth from noise. A mother on her way to fetch her child home from school starts to remember girlhood molestations committed by her father, and must crawl forward on all fours on the sidewalk because her world has now become unstable. An overweight woman periodically wrecks the furniture in her apartment, tormented as she is by slender phantoms, economic globalization, and a mysterious male visitor who helps iron out her accumulated newspapers. Finally a placid-looking house in the countryside offers its resident no refuge from trespassing spaces and alternative time zones. “Today I felt pass over me a breath of wind from the wings of madness,” wrote the poet Baudelaire. Now it's your turn. (In Finnish with English subtitles)