Smile at Last review – photo-love-story style parable of a teen abandoned at a tough Soviet youth facility

This intriguing 1985 film from Estonia uses nonprofessionals and handheld camerawork, which brings faces looming up to the screen. It is directed by Leida Laius and Arvo Iho and based on the YA novel Stepmother by Estonian author Silvia Rannamaa. The Estonian title Naerata Ometi is translated here as Smile at Last; perhaps it should be Give Us a Smile as it is what a boorish, bullying guy tells a shy, unhappy young woman.

It is at one level a kind of coming-of-age story, but entirely without that genre’s usual, sentimental sense of something finally learned or gained from an emotional rite of passage – something finally to smile about, in fact. Actually, it is more of a mysterious parable, couched in the language of soap opera or photo-love story, depicting the Soviet state and its gruesome pretension to be caring or nurturing.

Mari (Monika Raide) is a teenager whose mum has died and whose feckless dad has taken up with another woman; Mari has been packed off to a residential youth care facility somewhere between an orphanage and a state boarding school. She tries to run away and winds up spending the night at a police station, where a photo of Lenin frowns down from the walls. Back in the home, unhappy Mari is lost in a tough world where many of the young women are single mothers whose kids are bullied; one is literally locked in a drier and left to tumble. She soon learns that the top dog is Robi (Hendrik Toompere Jr), the swaggering, preening tough guy with a retinue of submissive boys and girls. He is the one who tells Mari to “smile”. But there is also Tauri (Tauri Tallermaa), a more caring and sensitive guy who has a talent for music, and a rumoured connection to Robi. He seems to like Mari, but Mari is to realise that Robi is not what he seems.

There is a dreamlike quality to the action, despite its ostensible kitchen-sink realism. It is almost a kind of pastoral: the young people in this institution apparently have no school lessons, they seem free to just drift around, playing games, pursuing crushes, quarrels and intrigues, until it all turns sour. But there is a curious kind of acceptance; has Mari become institutionalised, just as the head teacher predicted, when she brought Mari back from the police station? A strange, bittersweet vignette.