Miki Liukkonen’s profile picture is full weight

Miki Liukkonen – What you didn’t know about me yet. Yle Areena. General Theme 10.12. at 1:00 p.m. ★★★★

Documentary author Miki from Liukkonen (1989–2023) begins with an explanation of the name.

What you didn’t know about me yet (2024) is a great working title for any documentary, and in this case it became the final title.

In the first scene, the director Minna von Reiche explains the meaning of the name to Liukkonen. At the same time, the viewer is told that the making of the documentary follows the will of the author, who died half a year later.

But how does the documentary manage to respond to its own cry?

Documentary in the beginning it looks bad. Liukkonen goes to visit the publishing house, and the reception at WSOY is stiffly respectful. It becomes clear that Liukkonen, shuffling through the layers, is the one who will reform Finnish literature.

“Miki is such a rarity that a talent appears around the corner even before a physical person. He is such an exception”, CEO of the publishing house Timo Julkunen analyze.

Liukkonen himself justifies his motive for the writer’s boring work as follows:

“Probably because there are so many bad writers in Finland, this literature needs to be saved.”

At the publishing house the filmed scene remains almost the only one in which the documentary crew films Liukko himself. The original intention was to follow the writer’s life from the end of 2022 until October 2023, but the plans changed after Liukkonen’s death in the summer of 2023.

After this, the documentary outlines the author’s past life through close interviews and videos shot by him. Even at the beginning of filming, Liukkonen’s mood was hopeful: he is planning a biography of himself and an autumn trip to Paris with his then-fiancé Rita Behmin with.

Until then, however, the writer’s strength was not enough.

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Behm tells about the couple’s everyday life with admirable frankness.

Fortunately the documentary quickly moves on from pampering the genius myth. The story of the little sisters conveys a sensitive and fragile child, whom you didn’t always dare to touch. Undoubtedly, the death of his mother also had its own significance for the problems of Liukkonen’s adulthood: she died of cancer when the writer was 19 years old.

In addition to interviews, Liukkonen’s mental landscape is opened up by his own painful diary entries. He says that he enjoyed himself in Aurora’s closed ward, where he ended up after several suicide attempts, but there were problems with everyday life.

The separation from Behm was also clearly a tough spot for Liukkonen. In the video he filmed, he says that his unstable personality disorder makes him like a burn patient without skin: everything feels extremely strongly.

In the author’s opinion, others did not understand how much everything hurt him, even the little things.

“Like a thousand knives. Straight to the heart. Black void,” he wrote in his notes.

Behm does not take a stand on the divorce in the documentary, but tells about the couple’s everyday life in an admirably frank manner. According to him, for example, Liukkonen’s spending was determined by his sudden impulsiveness. With the advance of his book, Liukkonen bought a 500 euro razor. Sometimes there was no money for oat milk, but there were dozens of quality donuts in the fridge.

The paradoxical relationship with one’s own image will also be discussed. Liukkonen lifted pounds and often ate healthily, but dissed writers who enjoy running. He got bloody angry with Behm when he mentioned the gym hobby in an interview.

Otherwise, it was important for the writer to confirm the image created by the journalists of him as an exceptional individual. Among other things, he fantasized that authors could be ranked in literature. It is not unclear who he thinks would be number one.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the documentary is the repeated mentions of the author’s brain.

Liukkonen’s longtime friend, cartoonist Ville Ranta says that Liukkonen’s head “was messed up like a beehive”, which was visible, for example, in forgetting ordinary facts: “I often wonder what the hell is going on in that person’s head.”

The other side of a couple of friends Rebecca Naatus on the other hand describes Liukkonen’s writing as “Asperger’s”.

Author’s father Esa Liukkonen says that as a child Liukkonen had extraordinary sensory experiences. Among other things, the boy had told his friend that he had seen objects floating. He had also stated as an adult that he has three brains.

“It was related to the idea that he received three times more information about his environment than others,” says Esa Liukkonen.

“And this is how he also experienced his life three times more strongly than we did. So when he died at the age of 33, you can think that he actually died at the age of 99.”

In all What you didn’t know about me yet is a labor victory born of difficulties, which manages to answer the question indicated by its name moderately. It’s an intimate documentary about a talented, sensitive and broken person who suffered a lot, created a lot, loved cats and used way too much social media.

The main focus is on the person, not on the literary production.

The documentary ends To Liukkonen’s farewell message, in which he hopes that people would not blame him.

Maybe he himself would have needed a fourth brain. Such people show mercy.