One Last Deal by Anna Heinamaa - 9 out of 10

One Last Deal by Anna Heinamaa
9 out of 10


One Last Deal is a formidable, if with a small audience alas, Finnish motion picture.

If we can joke, it is a film that makes you wonder how is it that the Finns have taken first place on the charts of the happiest people from the Danes?
I mean even their heroes, like Olavi, from this feature here, are rather hard to like, cold, self centered, isolated, laconic, distant from their family and robotic to a large extent.

Olavi is 72 and has a business selling art, which might soon have to change hands, seeing that his income is falling, he has to keep the shop open for longer hours, up to seven in the evening, to compete with others and he is not young anymore.
However, he may have a chance to make One Last Deal.

As he keeps roaming the auction houses, he finds a portrait that is listed with an anonymous author, but he has a suspicion.
He tries to find out more, for he suspects that this is the great Ilya Repin.

Great my foot!
I mean, this is no Rembrandt, Goya or El Greco, just a Russian painter for the lay person.

Olavi speaks with a colleague, who has loaned him money in the past, and maintains that:

No Finnish painter could do that!

Nevertheless, there is no proof that the Russian painter is the author,  at least up to the point where his grandson, son of his estranged daughter, comes into the frame.
As the daughter asks her father to have the boy around so that he can get a grade for school, the intrepid teenager takes the bus, finds a volume where the painting is listed as The Christ by Repin.

Indeed, the Art Museum would have the explanation of the missing signature.
The great painter saw this as an icon and therefore could not sign it...apparently one doesn't sign an icon, it would be blasphemy or something similar.

At the auction, Olavi bids up to 10,000 for the painting with anonymous author and he would struggle to get that sum together.
He asks his daughter for a loan and we discover that he has had no idea about her destitution, the fact that they still have to pay the gambling debts of her ex husband and they skip on food...

A buyer from the other happiest country, Denmark, says he is going to buy the Repin, but he is a rather loathsome individual so...

Will he buy it?
Will there be a One Last Deal?