Sysmäläinen / The Man From Sysmä / Ein Mann von Sysmä

Set in Finland in the 1620s. Arvid and Brita were pushed into an arranged marriage as children. Fifteen years later, Arvid is a famous fencer and hasn’t seen his wife since their wedding day. In Turku, he falls for a nameless beauty. But she rebuffs him when he proposes marriage. Arvid nonetheless sends his manservant to convince Brita to grant him a divorce. But it turns out that Brita herself was the nameless beauty. To teach Arvid a lesson, she finds him in Sysmä after dressing a young man instead of an attractive woman, because “first I want him to like me as a person” … “The Man from Sysmä” does double duty as both a rom-com and a spirited swashbuckler set against Finland’s magnificent summer landscape. Shot a year before the Soviet-Finnish Winter War, the film is astoundingly liberal. The saucy interplay of the sexes is taken to the extreme when the bogus young man pretends to be a bogus young woman.