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

With handheld camerawork, this unsentimental rite of passage film follows Mari, who tries to escape from a residential home in Estonia

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.