AKI KAURISMÄKI. FILM AGAINST MISFORTUNE
About ten minutes into Kauas pilvet karkaavat (Drifting Clouds, 1996), Lauri, the character played by Käri Väänänen, discovers that the economic situation has forced the company he works for —it is an urban bus company and people are more inclined to use the train or their own vehicles— to restructure, which means that four drivers are going to have to leave. How to decide who to send to the unemployment lines? The manager takes out a deck of playing cards and lets the staff choose: those who get the lowest cards are going home. Lauri gets a three of clubs.
The opening minutes of the film that some consider the first in the Losers Trilogy, filmed over a decade by Aki Kaurismäki [Mies vailla menneisyyttä (The Man Without a Past, 2002, awarded at Cannes) and Laitakaupungin valot (Lights in the Dusk, 2006) would be the other two]. It is a distillation of some of the visual and thematic constants of Kaurismäki films. But, above all, it clearly shows the particular sense of fatum present throughout his work. Aki Kaurismäki (Orimattila, Finland, 1957) was the third of four children in a middle-class family that had lived in seven different cities before he could finish secondary school. In spite of both Aki and his elder brother, Mika, showing an early interest in film, he was rejected by the Finland Film School in 1977. He started to study Journalism at the University of Tampere while Mika studied filming in Munich. It was his elder brother who would end up involving him in audiovisual thanks to the script (which they co-wrote) of Valehtelija (The Liar, 1981), a medium-length film starred by Aki himself. The success obtained in local Finnish circles would allow Kaurismäki begin his career, adapting a classic such as Rikos ja rangaistus (Crime and Punishment, 1983), a film that he insists he hates in spite of the fact that it is still very interesting today–partly due to the value of the portrayal of the urban environment of Helsinki during the 1980s. Later would come a few crazy comedies (the feature-length Calamari Union or the short Rock’y VI) before signing off on one of the most interesting works of his whole career, Varjoja paratiisissa (Shadows in Paradise, 1986), with which he took part in the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes and the Toronto Festival. It already seemed clear that anything could come from misfortune, which usually becomes the natural enemy of Kaurismäki’s anti-heroes. Misfortune which always appears to fiercely hit the working class. “I don’t know bankers, nor do I want to. What dialogue would I write in a film about bankers? Something like: “What am I going to wear to the party today?” They’re not powerful —as we think— but slaves to money”. Films by the Finnish director are inhabited by losers from a majority social class that is the victim of another one that the filmmaker does not hesitate to define as idiots. Money, affirms Kaurismäki, “is always on the side of the idiots. I make films for losers because I feel like a loser”.
Victims of this misfortune, his characters fight to avoid their downfall, or at least to alleviate its effects; that is what, for example, the leading characters do in the exemplary Proletariat Trilogy —besides the aforementioned Shadows in Paradise, Ariel (id., 1988) and Tulitikkutehtaan tyttö (The Match Factory Girl, 1990)— for which he received notable critical acknowledgement in Europe. But as then, also in the rest of his films, Kaurismäki lends an unmistakable natural dignity to his characters, which allows their condition to be appreciated and provokes the viewer’s empathy. From the contrast between this constant and the distance with which the director deals visually with his characters —whether leading actors, antagonists or secondary characters— there arises a very particular and attractive narrative and visual style. It is not unusual that he has epigones and imitators.
Two elements are of fundamental value to that distancing à la Kaurismäki: on the one hand, strict directing of a staple group of actors including names such as Matti Pellonpää, Kati Outinen and Elina Salo, amongst others (“the performers are never puppets, they are flesh and blood, but I do not want them to shake their hands about all the time as if they were a windmill. The magic of film is between the camera and the actor’s eyes”); and on the other, expressive directing of photography by Timo Salminen, who is often unnaturally present to underline certain aspects of each story. Besides his Finnish films (the two aforementioned trilogies, for example, but also the wild comedies about the extravagant and funny Leningrad Cowboys group), Kaurismäki’s work opened naturally onto other stages in Europe during the nineties: he filmed in the United Kingdom, with Jean-Pierre Léaud in the starring role of I Hired a Contract Killer (1990); in France: La vie de Bohème (The Bohemian Life, 1992) about the work of Henri Murger, and explicitly not about the Puccini opera; and in Portugal, where he spends the most of the year: the short films Bico (2004) and O tasqueiro (2012).
Last point. In response to misfortune, the other great key to Kaurismäki’s work is optimism. At least a certain courageous spirit that ends up taking hold of the downtrodden stars of his films, who are always ready to listen to a tango or a rock song to get the most out of each drop of life. The director says “I don’t want to spread my pessimism in the films”, and that is how we can understand the end of his last fictional feature film to date: Le Havre (id., 2011), filmed once again in France and with the Marcel Marx (André Wilms) of La vie de Bohème turned into a poor great-heart shoe shiner. The urgent political content —barely concealed on this occasion— does not cast a shadow over the universality of its message.
Rubén Corral
Programmer at ZINEBI
