What do you do when you know your prognosis is hopeless and you're told you aren't very likely to make it to your 18th birthday? Two Finnish teenagers, diagnosed with the malicious tumor, team up and escape from the hospital mere days after they had met to taste life before their inevitable death. That's how One-way ticket to Mombasa, another film I translated for AleKino! 2009, begins and it's what it revolves around.
The boys are driven by different motivations. Pete, an aspiring guitarist caught completely off guard by the illness, wants to travel north to see his neighbour he quietly fancies hoping that she harbours feelings for him too whereas black-humoured Jusa is desperate to travel to Mombasa, which - possibly due to the dreamy lyrics of one song by the Finnish disco band from the 1990s Movetron - is synonymous with fun, adventure and feeling good. Badly needing each other, they strike a deal and agree, first, to go to Lapland, have a try with Pete's date and then come back to Helsinki and, possibly three of them, fly to Kenya. Soon, caught dodging the fare, they're thrown out of the train in Kuopio, halfway between Finland's capital and their final destination. Thanks to their ingenuity and vivacity, they manage to raise funds for further travel by putting on a series of street shows, even though Jusa suffers from more and more frequent fits of the illness. In Lapland, Pete lets it off his chest and wins, not without resistance, Kata's heart, but the bad news is that Jusa continues to slide. In this race against time, they don't let chances to have fun slip and get involved in a series of absurd antics. In their course, Jusa - visibly losing steam - shamefully admits to never having had a girl in his life, despite his earlier boastful declarations of being an exceptional lover. To Pete's astonishment, Kata takes pity on the dying Jusa and initiates him in a roadside shed moments before he dies. Pete's cancer remits.
Again, it was a serious disease that grabbed the central stage for a Scandinavian film, after the Norwegian Through a Glass, Darkly, and it seems this is one avenue filmmakers from European welfare states are eager to explore, in absence of other ailments that afflict these abundant societies. But Ticket to Mombasa, in a large measure a road film, was more on a light-hearted side, with a good-natured and a bit idealised view of the final days of the disease. There was less of compelling, philosophical reflection that featured so strongly in Though a Glass, but it gave the film its separate, individual edge.
a lay = a lovemaker,
broads = girls who are hired to come to parties to please,
You two can join the circus for all I care,
to pay up front,
a weather vane,
lymphoma = lymphatic cancer
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