There is an economy to everything that occurs in a Kaurismäki movie. Behind the simplicity, the naive dialogue, there is a carefully curated colour palette, sound design, camera angle. The storytelling feels simple, but engrossing. As though the director’s roots stretch back to the silent era, when movies had to narrate without the assistance of language. The medium was contingent on the image. In a sense the greater the absurdity of the tale (in this instance Jean-Pierre Leaud hiring a contract killer to kill himself, a job he can’t do on on his own), the more it plays into Kaurismäki’s cinematic ethos. This is cinema beyond naturalism. The careful staging, the artful repetition of specific shots, the emphasis on the falseness of cinema, its constructive tendencies, allows the director to reveal there are other ways of telling film stories, reminding us that film is a hieroglyphic language all of its own, not so far removed from the glyphs found in Egyptian tombs.
The other striking aspect of this particular film is its depiction of a lost London, the London before the nineties blew up. When bomb sites might still pepper the urban terrain, when flats which would later be worth a million pounds were fleapits, before Docklands became Canary Wharf. (Which once again strangely makes me think of the Long Good Friday.) Leaud’s Henri loses his job of fifteen years due to privatisation and he is tarred as a foreigner and signed off with a Five Pound fake gold watch. Margi Clarke says that the working class has no homeland. The denouement takes place in the cemetery where Marx is buried. The film depicts a world lost to turbo-capitalism and property speculation, a world I fleetingly knew before it was redeveloped beyond recognition, even if the Warwick Castle still serves pints on Portobello Road.
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