A mother and her young son emerge from their house for the last time as a family made temporary by an interrupting war. The thin trunks of topless trees can't camouflage the old man in black whose convergence with the woman and the boy is halted by the next anxious moment. The bible should be a dead giveaway to this apprehensive encounter, but the priest removes his hat before he gets any closer, just so there's no confusion about the meaning of their meeting. Before long, Eero(Topi Majaniemi) and his mother(Marjaana Maijala) are told by some grim women that they'll have to separate. And so it is, the church's will, that Eero finds himself on a crowded boat with other fatherless Finnish children, en route to Sweden where he'll live with a Swedish family until the war is over.<br /><br />"Aideista parhain" is about the unexamined feelings between Eero and his mother Kirsti during the period of their severed existences, in which both parties are forced to revisit when the former "war child" returns to Sweden for the funeral of his foster mother, breaking the complicit silence they maintained throughout the intervening decades. Told in flashback, this black and white film switches to color, as if the past is more vivid to Eero than the present.<br /><br />By boat, by train, and then by bus, the boy whose father was killed by Russians, meets his new guardians on an unpaved road; Hjalma(Michael Nyqvist) and Signe(Maria Lundqvist) Jonsson, one of many Swedish couples who provided shelter and sustenance to over seventy-thousand Finnish children affected by the war. While the farmer seems accommodating enough, Signe is hostile and sometimes downright odious towards Eero from the outset, walking ahead of her husband and charge with a head full of steam, back to their house on a farm. Since we recognize that "Aideista parhain" aspires to be an epic cut from the same cloth as American epics about life during wartime, we're not fooled by Signe's distaste for the "strange" Finnish boy with his strange Finnish ways. Panorama after panorama of sumptuous Swedish scenery makes it clear that "Aideista parhain" is governed by the same parameters as a mainstream studio movie from Hollywood. Signe may shout, or even hit Eero, but she's not going to stab him with a kitchen knife, nor will the boy, like a boy from some Patrick McCabe adaptation. The movie's soundtrack is so sentimental, so heavily laden with strings to overemphasize every moment of incident with its crescending bulge, it takes away the possibility of the unexpected, because "Aideista parhain" is essentially a European version of a prestige film meant to secure multiple Oscar nominations.<br /><br />But when Signe's moment of transformation arrives, the emergence of the nurturing mother beneath that gruff exterior we predicted all along seems entirely arbitrary, as is her epiphany about Eero's sudden lovability. In the last scene, Signe chastises the boy for stealing money and running away. She calls social services to send the boy back home. But when the administrative woman suggests that Eero would be sent to a children's home, Signe has a change of heart, but the audience will be hard-pressed to allocate that change of heart's origin. Thin air, that's where she got it. His impending departure should be cause for celebration after her constant ill-mannered behavior towards the boy. There's not enough smoke and mirror-magic from the screenplay to obscure the paradigm.<br /><br />After "Aideista parhain" is through with casting Signe as the villain, we learn that Eero's mother abandoned him in favor of a German soldier. The film would be riveting if we, along with Eero, had a harder time deciding between both mothers when it's time for his return to Finland. "Aideista parhain" decides for us. Of course, we're more sympathetic towards Signe's claim, after all, his birth mother is f****** a soldier affiliated with the Nazi party. While Eero functions as a replacement for Signe's dead little girl(who drowned under her care), the mother uses her son as a preventive measure against a heartbreak of the romantic sort(or so it seems).<br /><br />"Aideista Parhain" gets even more manipulative after the old man learns belatedly about his mother's intentions in a letter written by Signe. It's a far-fetched notion that Eero never broached the subject with Kirsti in all those years, because if he felt like a consolation prize to a German, logic dictates that he'd return to Sweden and seek the real love of a devoted mother. "Aideista Parhain" is unmistakably misogynistic; it gets off on reducing an old woman to tears, then tries to have it both ways by redeeming her. But it's too late. The audience will feel jerked around after investing our allegiance with Signe.<br /><br />"Aideista parhain" casts Signe and Kirsti as the mother and the whore, then lacks the conviction to let the sow be a sow.