Aki Kaurismaki is the best known Scandinavian dark humorist. His works have taken Finnish cinema outside Finland. He actively organizes Midnight Sun Film Festival with his brother, Mika – also a film-maker. They produce other Finnish films through their company, ‘Villealfa’, whose productions are known for its breathtaking speed. In a field characterized by time-consuming funding applications and well-made literary, prestige productions, the Kaurismaki brothers have proved that it was possible to produce movies for relatively little money in a short time period (within 50 days).
In World War II, Finland allied with Nazi Germany to fight
the Russians and eventually lost. After that it tried to appease its powerful
neighbor, Russia through the Cold War foreign policy. This situation gave
undignified labels and did much damage to Finland’s national pride. However,
Kaurismaki’s movies are not about restoring the pride. He tries to probe
beneath the surface illusion of Finland’s affluent society, exploring the lives
of those disadvantaged by Finland’s transition from traditional heavy industry
to a high-tech information and consumer economy. So, many of his films begin
with a description, a montage from a workplace such as a factory, a truck
depot, or a mine.
Kaurismaki’s protagonists are drifters, alcoholics,
blue-collar workers and deadbeats – different kinds of peoples from the working
class. The reticent characters of Kaurismaki drawn on and parody Finnish
stereotypes: shyness, reclusiveness and quirkiness – characteristics thought to
be bred by Finnish people’s seclusion on Arctic stretches. In Aki’s shots of
the city, central perspective street sights dominate; and his archetypal
landscape is a cafeteria. Understood as a sign, a remainder for post-war
Finnish audiences of the shared past, its design signals a period of transition
from agrarian (rural) to city life. Cafeterias were characteristic of small
Finnish communities and working-class quarters of the cities where the
Kaurismaki’s grew up. These pleasantly anonymous cafes became meeting places
for post-war teenagers.
Finnish or Scandinavian cinema is generally oriented towards
naturalism. By contrast, Kaurismaki’s films give priority to external realism
through ascetic settings, but indulge in fanciful turns, especially through
music – Finnish tango – a crucial element of Finnish popular culture. As seen
in his film, “Leningrad Cowboys Go America” (1989), rock and roll is another
influence in Finnish culture. Aki expresses characters’ melancholia and utopian
dreams in a deliberately kitsch fashion in this movie. He also combines social
realism with stylized comedy filled with pastiches of popular genre: road
movie, gangster film and film noir. Understatement is his key technique,
supporting minimal dialogue and deadpan acting.
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| Matti Pellonpaa and Kati Outinen |
Matti Pellonpaa is the actor who best personifies the gloom
of a Kaurismaki protagonist (especially in “Ariel” and “Take Care of your
Scarf, Tatjana”). Pellonpaa won the European Felix prize for Best European
actor in 1991. Kati Outinnen, another Kaurismaki’s favorite, specializes in the
female version of despondency. She won the Best Actress Award at Cannes for her
role in Aki’s “Man without a Past” (2002).
The best of Kaurismaki’s work is the ‘new Finland trilogy.’
The first installment “Drifting Clouds” (1996) shows ordinary Helsinki workers
persisting with quiet determination while their routine lives are shattered by
wider economic trends – high unemployment and multinational takeovers of local
businesses. “Man Without a Past”, the second installment articulates the social
problem of homelessness -- another overlooked aspect of contemporary Finland. Here,
a nameless protagonist travels to Helsinki is search of work, is robbed and
beaten up, loses his memory and begins a new life among the city’s homeless who
live in Helsinki dock containers – a virtual collection of Kaurismaki’s earlier
films, where the city is invariably a hostile place, full of crooks and
hoodlums.
Aki’s films both derive and comment on classical melodrama.
What may be called the commonsensical mechanisms of melodrama -- repetition,
proverbial sayings, clichés, its employment of history and memory – involve a
stylized and natural commitment to past actions and behavior. The story often
holds a secondary place to cinematic space. In fact it is constructed as
critical space allowing the interrogation of political, social and economic
power structures. The orchestration of the narrative, the emphasis on muteness
and the excessive use of music refer to the commonsensical functions of the
melodrama though in a self-conscious way. For instance, the excesses in “Match
Factory Girl” (1990) (belongs to proletariat trilogy) are an exposure of abundance and it presents a
mise-en-scene which is highly stylized, archaic and minimalist.
In Kaurismaki’s films, the difficulties in expressing
feelings do not indicate their absence: the obvious lack of eloquent verbal
expression in the Kaurismaki films only proclaims that they are to be found
elsewhere. Desire is omnipresent, only it is sealed in the evasive gazes and in
the music. “The Match Factory Girl”, for instance, a film that contains only
twenty-four lines of dialogue presents a well-known Finnish tango from the
first bar to the last: Iris, the central character, visits a dance hall, where
the camera is placed in the doorway and registers the band in three steady
takes. The melody sung in this film tells of the singer’s yearning for the land
beyond the vast sea: where warm wind sweeps over sunny beaches. The singer is
lamenting because he is ‘a prisoner of the earth, without wings.’ The words
create a stunning discrepancy with the rigidity of the dance hall. In this
scene, the musical performance becomes an expression for both the singer and
Iris’s feelings and their inability to assert them.
“American cinema is dead!
The European one is dying and I’m not feeling particularly well either”,
said Kaurismaki in an interview (two decades back), which shows his public
persona in line with his cinematic universe. His movies are less sophisticated
but are often straight to the point. He has consistently sabotaged any proposal
of meaning or intent behind his work. He often contradicts with his statements
and mostly finishes an explanation with: “I don’t know who cares?” As a
cinephile, you can either join in his pragmatic quest for political, national
and gendered values or can just ask ‘why bother?’ and return to more
conventional films.
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