lights in the dusk (w&d kaurismäki)

The film opens with a group of Russians discussing Russian literature, naming Gorky, Pushkin and Tolstoy. This sets up the most Dosteyevskian of the director’s films. The narrative follows the grim fate of Koistinen, a night watchman who is targeted by a femme fatale in a honey trap, setting him up as the fall guy when the people she works for steal jewels from the site he is supposed to be guarding. Things keep going from bad to worse for Koistinen. He encounters fate’s barbs with a stoicism that seems almost perverse. The Helsinki which Kaurismäki shows is one that has become ‘modernised’. Neon and new builds dominate. But the space for human kindness has shrunk. Whilst retaining Kaurismäki’s deadpan humour, this film feels closer to his nordic neighbour Bergman in tone and mournfulness. 

i hired a contract killer (w&d kaurismäki, w. peter von bagh)

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. 

hamlet goes business (w&d aki kaurismäki, w. shakespeare)

On Friday we were lucky enough to attend a talk by the Argentine philosopher, Eduardo Rinesi on Shakespeare. Much of the talk focussed on Hamlet as a bridge between the renaissance world of machiavelli, and the coming world of the enlightenment, signalled by the work of Hobbes. Hamlet acts as a hinge between these two worlds, which saw the evolution of the idea of the contract, both legal and social, as society moved away from the blood feud, the revenge tragedy. The talk was engrossing and entertaining, and suggested echoes in the evolution of Latin American society, in a world where clowns roost on the political stage and seize power.

All of which set up perfectly Kaurismäki’s take on the tale. Aside from a twist at the conclusion, which could be said to lend a more Marxist take to the narrative, Kaurismäki stays faithful to Shakespeare. The originality comes from two elements: positing the story in the world of business (similarly to Kurosowa), where contemporary figures squabble to control a business empire; and the ingenuity required to relocate the play in a cinematic near-present. The former allows Claudius the priceless moment of suggesting he is sending Hamlet to London to negotiate with ‘Murdoch’, testament to the omnipresence of the Australian in the shaping of modern culture. As the writers of Succession realised, the modern globalised business world is fertile territory for Shakespearian drama. It would be interesting to learn if Jesse Armstrong is a fan of Kaurismäki.

As for the ingenuity, the director employs his now accustomed blend of deadpan humour and simplicity. If a gun is useful, he uses a gun. If poison works best, he poisons a drink or a chicken. The film flirts with realism, (notably during the titles and credits) whilst constructing its own logic, permitting characters to do whatever is needed to advance the plot. There are few exterior shots, but when Hamlet appears framed against a shipyard he has saved, it has a real impact. (And strangely makes me think of the Long Good Friday.) Kaurismäki is seeding ideas here about manufacturing, trade, globalisation and capitalism. Ideas which are often explored in his work, but tend to go under the radar, as audiences revel in his downtrodden characters, punkish sensibility and smiley Nordic misanthropy. 

the man without a past (w&d kaurismaki)

Kaurismaki’s cinema really doesn’t feel as though it ought to work in the 21st century. It feels like the lost child of the silent era. The photography is beautifully crude. The colour palette is unashamedly contrived. The dialogue lacks any obvious subtext. The stories are simple, without any of the derivations or complications so beloved of modern scriptwriting. It feels like the anti-Nolan, if you like, whose bombastic cinema is the apotheosis of what the movies, even ‘serious’ movies have become. And yet, Kaurismaki’s cinema is always an unadorned delight. Simplicity, as his fellow Nordic savant, Fosse, also understands, has a power that all the machinations of the world struggle to compete with. The Man without a Past is yet another example of this, a fable which feels timeless, which nevertheless succeeds in communicating so much about the nature of identity, and its construction, a sly peaen to the IG generation, all of them deadset on creating themselves from scratch. It can be done, but it helps if someone smashes you over the head with a baseball bat first.  

fallen leaves (w&d kaurismaki)

The Finnish maestro, who throws some Gardel into his Helsinki set love story, reminds us of the power of simplicity. Woman meets Man, they encounter obstacles, they would appear to overcome them. Everything is stripped back. The camera is static, the acting is static, the narrative is by numbers. Only in his dialogue, with its offbeat humour, and his choice of film posters which populate the background (Brief Encounter, Pierrot le Fou, etc) does Kaurismaki let his hair down a bit. The simplicity is almost two dimensional and yet, by a mysterious alchemy, it is incredibly effective. The audience is sucked into the vortex of his two working class lovers, in spite of jerry-built obstacles which would never pass the BFI development stress test. (He walks into a tram, she, a woman with no apparent history, conveniently comes from a family of alcoholics). The final pay-off, as Ansa reveals the name of her dog, is a homage to the years of the early, silent cinema, and there is something about that era’s seemingly naive use of story and emotion which is echoed by Fallen Leaves. In contrast to the more baroque filmmaking of his Nordic compañero, Roy Andersson, Kaurismaki revels in how much you can do with how little. The language of dramatic storytelling is not as complex as some would like to think. 

juha (w&d aki kaurismäki)

Kaurismäki’s film is a pitch perfect homage to cinema’s silent era. Essentially a three hander, it reminds the viewer of the virtues of simplicity and clarity in story-telling, virtues which permit the filmmaker to therefor indulge his or her chosen whims. The highly limited use of dialogue means an additional emphasis on shot composition and score. It also reminds us that cinema is an inherently technical art, involving the juxtaposition of artificial moments. The sum of these juxtaposed moments is greater than the whole. Kaurismäki seems to delight in flirting with the ridiculous and still succeeding in cooking up pathos from his morality fable, adapted from a classic work of nineteenth century Finnish literature written by Juhani Aho. 

compartment number 6. (w&d juho kuosmanen, w. andris feldmanis)

Another tale from the Arctic circle, Compartment Number 6 is a railroad road movie which follows the Finnish protagonist, Laura, from Moscow to Murmansk. Laura finds herself in a sleeper carriage with Ljoha, a drunken Mayakovsky lookalike. Initially intimidated by him, their trip then turns into an odd couple romance. The film opens with a literary party in Moscow, where people quote Pelevin, and in this moment one wonders whether Compartment Number 6 might offer an insight into that other Russia, the one that seems to have been kicked into the long grass, both by Putin and his henchmen and the rest of the world. Pelevin’s Russia is full of strangeness and a warped literary cynicism which goes back to Gogol, Bulgakov and their ilk. But after suggesting it might investigate these offbeat roots, the film doesn’t really go there, no matter how much Yuriy Borisov, as Ljoha tries. His erratic but doleful performance lends the film a slightly more left field outlook, but this is really Laura’s story. Not all that dissimilar from this year’s breakout European film, Trier’s The Worst Person in the World, Compartment Number 6 is another film by a man which is a study in a woman achieving some kind of altered consciousness through an unexpected love affair that doesn’t work out as it might have done. This zeitgeisty theme is well framed by the train journey and the Maguffin of Laura’s quest to find the Murmansk petroglyphs, but the film’s ultimate destination feels seems more prosaic than the spectacular scenery it presents.

Mr Curry, more generously, suspected that the issues we shared with the film might have been down to the source material novel from which the film has been adapted.

the other side of hope (w&d aki kaurismäki)

Kaurismäki’s latest film addresses Europe’s most topical subject. Khaled is an Afghani refugee who has stowed away on a boat shipping coal to Helsinki. After various misadventures he finally finds a home for himself working in the restaurant of Wilkstrom, a lugubrious but well-intentioned man. The restaurant is a haven for Khaled, where common humanity is the only thing that matters. There are several appearances at different moments of ageing rockabillies playing their tunes. These moments chime with a vision of the world which is determined by a down-to-earth humanism. (If you wanted to pursue the roots of this music, you would probably go via Presley to Chuck Berry or Muddy Waters and then back to slave music that arrived in the US, thereby meaning it belongs to a consciousness where nationalism is an irretrievably nostalgic concept, where regionalism is nothing more than a memory; meaning the players have been left with no option but to adopt a more universal perspective.) Kaurismäki, as is well known, uses this music and its Finnish aficionados as a kind of touchstone for his warm, fuzzy vision, something which complements his dry humour. Deadpan humour, from Beckett to Tati, is one of the world’s most universally understood codes. This helps to lend his films their appeal, making Kaurismäki one of those rare filmmakers (and the only Finnish one) to have generated a worldwide following. 

All of which means that The Other Side of Hope, marrying the filmmaker’s deadpan, cross-border appeal with an up-to-the-minute themed narrative, sounds like a surefire winner. However, whilst there are many affecting and entertaining moments in the film, and the two leads Sherwan Haji & Sakari Kuosmanen give notable performances, the lack of any real narrative development means that it feels as though it never really gets out of second gear. There’s a B-story involving the fate of Khaled’s sister, but this is resolved so easily that one wonders what all the fuss was about. A narrative about this issue has to tread a delicate line between resisting an urge to preach, whilst at the same time never over-simplifying things. There’s a moment when Khaled explains why he had to leave Afghanistan, which has real power in its simplicity, but thereafter the film feels as though it doesn’t really do Khaled’s story justice. For all its good intentions, The Other Side of Hope ends up feeling like a slightly uneasy foray into social realism from a director whose forte is creating a heightened world which teeters on the brink of credibility.