July 4, 1995 Vol. XL No. 27

A Tallinn Tale

By Anne Roston

Even for its makers, City Unplugged, which opened here last week, was not an obvious project. Screenwriter Paul Kolsby says when filmmaker Ilkka Jarvilaturi suggested to him over lunch in 1991 that they make a film in Estonia, he had to admit he didn't know where Estonia was. But he figured if they could get a picture made there, then fine, he was up for it.

Kolsby had met Jarvilaturi two and a half years earlier on the first day of a graduate dramatic writing class at NYU. "Everyone was talking about who they were, and the last one was this guy named Ilkka Jarvilaturi from Helsinki [Finland]. It was hopelessly exotic ... He was kind of like a grim intense hero who had no hair."

Jarvilaturi (who now sports some fuzz on his head) soon dropped out of NYU to focus on promoting his first full-length film, Homebound, which he had shot in Finland in 1989. But he and Kolsby continued to meet to discuss various projects, without settling on one until this fateful luncheon. Jarvilaturi had just that morning learned from friends in Finland that Estonia, the northernmost of the three ex-Soviet-controlled Baltic republics (and about 40 miles south of Finland), had relaxed its borders. He immediately saw a place to make a big film - fast and cheaply.

"All in all," Jarvilaturi says, "you'd get like five times more production value for your money to what it was in the West." He brought City Unplugged, the film that emerged from this lunch, in for just over $1 million, an impressive sum for a bar-no-explosives action movie.

Still, while Tom Cruise complained about shooting in Prague, at least a Western film tradition already existed there. That it didn't in Estonia made shooting in Tallinn, the country's capital, not just cheaper but tougher. "Half of this wonderful "five times more," Jarvilaturi says, "is swallowed up by different production difficulties: the prop doesn't show, the set isn't ready, you need 30 people for one lamp..."

Jarvilaturi himself had only been to Tallinn once-on a weekend trip with his family as a pre-adolescent. The sole story about Estonia he could recall from recent years was an article he had seen in Liberation on the return of the nation's gold reserves, hidden in a Parisian bank since WWII, to the Estonian National Treasury. He and Kolsby used it as the basis of their story.

A black comedy cum heist caper City Unplugged is about a gang of quibbling career criminals who bribe a young electrician named Toivo to black out Tallinn long enough to make off with the gold upon its return to the city. Their plot goes awry, however, when Toivo 's seven-month -pregnant wife goes into labor and he learns that their premature baby will die without a powered incubator. Waking up to what he's done to his family and country, Toivo fights to save them.

Okay, then: since Toivo means "hope" a connection between the birth of the baby and the birth of the newly independent Estonia must have been intended. "If it were baptized," Jarvilaturi says of the baby in the movie, "its name would be Estonia.... Obviously this historical situation is quite wonderful."

Kolsby whipped up a screenplay, and Jarvilaturi headed off to Tallinn to scout things out and get the script translated into Estonian. He quickly saw that just-emerging Independence made for a great parable but not necessarily smooth production sailing.

"We were using equipment that would have been considered historic from a Western perspective," Jarvilaturi says. But more bothersome was that "in Estonia, phones don't work. [If you need someone on the set], you send your A.D. running around town, like through three bars, two mistresses, and a wife, and maybe, if you find the person, he will show up."

Language was another hurdle, but Jarvilaturi remains sanguine about it. He brought a sound engineer over from Finland, because the concept of sync sound didn't exist in Estonia. Of the rest of the crew and cast, only the D.P. spoke English. "Obviously," Jarvilaturi says, "it was a slight confusion to have auditions in a language you don't speak." So he swiftly began learning Estonian, which happily is somewhat connected to Finnish.

Jarvilaturi also shrugs off the fact that the leading lady was from Latvia, where they speak something completely different. "I was auditioning her for giving birth, so very little language is needed for that," he says. She ended up learning her lines phonetically. Jarvilaturi does, however, admit that the Spanish-born Moscow-bred actor who played her doctor proved troublesome. Although a member of the Estonian National Theater, the actor - like many Russian nationals living in Estonia under the former Soviet Union - had no interest in the local language. Even with the help of a coach, he could never remember his lines.

Kolsby, who didn't learn Estonian, nonetheless got the job of assembling extras for the big crowd scene-and pulled it off: "I wrote a flier in English and had it translated. Then we drove around and I would run up to bus stops and hand them out saying, "aitah, aitah, aitah," which is Estonian for thank you." He used coffee, cigarettes, and a raffle as a lure. "We kept about 800 people [on the set] through the night. The big prize was this Aiwa boom box."

Amazingly, none of this chaos shows up in the movie. City Unplugged is a superbly taut thriller, displaying strains of Welles, Hitchcock and Capra. Indeed, the great irony is that City Unplugged in no way resembles a "Soviet," Russian, or even a typical Finnish picture. It looks, well universal. This was intended.

"From my perception," Jarvilaturi says, "Estonia is, in this movie, a fictional country. It could be Jamaica - if Jamaica became independent under similar political circumstances."

Still, it's worth noting that Jarvilaturi's next two projects-one, a werewolf comedy called The Charm; the other, a psychological thriller exploring the media's relationship with violence - are both safely set in the New York metro area, where he now makes his home.