Syke-elokuva: Särkynyt sydän

Taavi Vartia: Syke-elokuva: Särkynyt sydän (FI 2023) with Jarkko Niemi (Petteri Holopainen), Lotta Kaihua (Heidi), Niina Koponen (Noora).

Syke: Brustet hjärta.

    D: Taavi Vartia. SC: Petja Peltomaa. DP: Jyri Hakala. AD: Inka Uusitalo-Matilainen. Cost: Henna-Riikka Taskinen. Makeup: Mari Vaalasranta. M: Karl Sinkkonen. ED: Jyrki Levä.

    90 min

    Finnish premiere 25 Dec 2023, distributed by Nelonen Media with Swedish subtitles.

    Viewed at Tennispalatsi 10, Helsinki, 20 Jan 2024.

The Syke franchise is known in Swedish as Puls and in English as Syke and Pulse.

Filmikamari Pressit: " Rakastetun mutta omalaatuisen kirurgin Petteri Holopaisen elämä on mallillaan, mutta kun Syke-sairaalaan kiidätetään hänelle tärkeä potilas, mikään ei voi palata enää ennalleen. Holopainen kadottaa kaiken sen, mikä on hänelle tärkeää. Kun Holopaisen arkeen astelee tuttu ihminen menneisyydestä, Holopaisen on päätettävä, millä on vielä merkitystä. "

AA: Syke (Pulse) is since 2014 a Finnish television phenomenon. The 15th season started last autumn. It is a multi-character study, and the cast covers much of the who's who of Finnish actors. The series creator is Petja Peltomaa, and Taavi Vartia has been the director of the recent seasons. The setting is the traumaosasto [trauma department] of the central hospital of a big city like Helsinki. The concept has similarities with ER (1994-2009) and belongs to a tradition of cinematic and televised medical drama series including Dr. Kildare, Medic, City Hospital, General Hospital, Ben Casey, Emergency!, M*A*S*H, Casualty and Charité.

Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) celebrated the tactile quality of the TV image in medical drama. In closed-circuit instruction in surgery, medical students reported that "they seemed not to be watching an operation, but performing it". "They felt that they were holding the scalpel". "Thus the TV image, in fostering a passion for depth involvement in every aspect of experience, creates an obsession with bodily welfare. The sudden emergence of the TV medico and the hospital ward as a program to rival the western is perfectly natural".

The original appeal of the medical drama lives on in phenomena like Syke. The vital ingredients are powerful and appealing: dealing with matters of life and death in a constant state of emergency. The source of tremendous drama is forever replenished. The sense of danger and violent injury is the same as in war films and brutal thrillers, but instead of killing people, the mission is saving people. Nothing can be more engrossing.

Of the Syke television franchise, two cinema spinoffs have been produced. I saw the first one, Syke: Hätätila (FI 2021, D: Tony Laine), which was distributed in English as Nurses - Dreadful Hospital Outage and remember the palpable gratification and intensity of the audience experience. This second spinoff (its Finnish title in literal translation: "Pulse: The Broken Heart") is the story of the surgeon Petteri Holopainen (Jarkko Niemi) whose wife Noora (Niina Koponen) dies in his hands on the operating table; only after the operation does he realize the patient's identity. He experiences a shock so severe that it takes him a year to recover. Meanwhile he becomes something like a sleepwalker and even a living dead. At home he speaks with Niina's ghost. He refuses to stay away from the hospital during his sick leave, yet also refuses to perform as a surgeon anymore. He is on the verge of getting fired. Colleagues seem to think that he should belong to a madhouse. But Petteri's contribution becomes crucial in solving a mysterious life-and-death emergency of two teenagers during Midsummer week, and the almost overwhelming challenge helps him get back on track again.

The subjects are stronger than melodrama, but because they are treated in clinical fashion, there is a strange, paradoxical atmosphere. In Syke: Särkynyt sydän the dialogue is often formal and literate in a consciously anti-realistic way like in the Finnish  Särkkä-Tulio-Donner-Kaurismäki tradition. Nobody speaks like that. Often the dialogue is near parody. The subjects are taken seriously but the attitude is only one step from comedy.

The total impact is a bizarre combination of deadly earnest and a spoof attitude.

Yet Syke: Särkynyt sydän evokes genuine issues including the obscene income gap between surgeons and nurses (reportedly something like a half of Finland's hospital staff considers changing jobs), self-destructiveness among young people and the dangers of conversion drugs. Petteri with his shallow attitudes has to some extent been a sleepwalker even before his shock experience..