Filmmaker is a man of constant sorrow
In a poignant scene from Aki Kaurismaki's "Drifting Clouds," a laid-off headwaitress desperate for income suffers the disgrace of interviewing for her former job -- only to be told she's too old. "But you're over 50," she protests to the new hiring manager. "Yes," he says with a straight face. "But I've got contacts."
That, in a nutshell, describes the eccentric mix of heartbreak and deadpan hilarity in the cinema of Kaurismaki, the Finnish filmmaker who picked up the Palme d'Or at Cannes last year for his magnificently dour "The Man Without a Past."
Kaurismaki himself is a gloomy, self-deprecating Scandinavian. ("I am a lousy filmmaker," he told a British interviewer, and called his "Leningrad Cowboys Go America" the "worst film in the history of cinema.") While such fatalistic assessments go far beyond any poison-pen gibes Rex Reed might dream of slaying him with, they are in perfect keeping with his cinematic outlook. After all, whether he is afflicted with self-doubt or a false sense of humility, Kaurismaki does have a genuine affection for the downtrodden, the down-and-out -- any of the "losers," as he likes to call them, on the margins of society -- who populate his sweetly morose films.
But for all his airs of glumness, the Helsinki-based auteur -- who has written, produced, and directed 23 films since 1981, 14 of which screen beginning tomorrow in a tribute at the Museum of Fine Arts -- obviously delights in peppering his minimal dramas of miserable lives with wry humor and a dash of physical comedy. (In another scene from "Drifting Clouds," the chef at an upscale restaurant madly guzzles a bottle of booze while fending off his poker-faced co-workers with a butcher's knife.) And why not? If you're going to make movies in Finland, where the suicide rates and the unemployment lines are as gloomy as an arctic midwinter day, it's best to have a sublime sense of the absurd.
Grumbling comparisons to Jim Jarmusch have nipped at Kaurismaki's heels for years, and, to be fair, such swipes aren't that far off the mark: Both directors are known for a quirky sense of humor and a mannered dialogue and for favoring slice-of-life tales about adorable oddballs. Kaurismaki's fun 1990 sendup of a '40s film noir, "I Hired a Contract Killer" -- about a suicidal municipal drone who hires a hit man to put him out of his misery, then changes his mind -- bears a strong resemblance to Jarmusch's "Mystery Train." He even poached one of that movie's principals, the Clash's Joe Strummer, for "Killer," giving him two indelible cameos. Jarmusch himself appears as an oily car salesman in "Leningrad Cowboys."
Despite those who feel the influence looms too large, Kaurismaki brings a fresh, bittersweet-comic vision to post-Godard European cinema that's all his own. His sympathies extend as much to the working class -- butchers, miners, bus drivers, farmers, waste-disposal managers -- as to the aimless drifters and outcasts who populate such films as "La Vie de Boheme" and "Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatiana." Likewise, through the lens of cinematographer Timo Salminen, Kaurismaki's Helsinki is reliably murky, drab, overcast, with much of the action taking place at night, or in expressionistically lit interiors. His sets are minimal too; the decor is unembellished.
Despite the dead weight of existence you feel in his films, Kaurismaki's signature is to punctuate such melancholy with black humor, unusual plot juxtapositions, and the strains of '50s and '60s rockabilly (live music features prominently in all his work). Beneath it all is a warm-hearted, if world-weary, humanism.
A perfect example is "Juha," a silent film from 1999 that, oddly enough, is one of the writer-director's most affecting. Shot in crisp black and white, it stars a Kaurismaki veteran, Sakari Kuosmanen, as a good-natured cabbage farmer whose young wife (Kati Outinen) abandons him for a glamorous life in the big city, courtesy of a slick-haired stranger in a fancy car. She thinks she's leaving behind a life of drudgery but instead finds herself held captive in a brothel. Even with the absence of dialogue, Kaurismaki tugs at your heartstrings -- such as when a dolled-up Outinen sassily flips through fashion mags while her sad, dumbfounded husband looks on -- only to subvert the nostalgic sentimentalism with a few expertly placed visual jokes.
As you'd expect with any filmmaker this prolific, Kaurismaki falters from time to time. His 1985 feature "Calamari Union" was a deranged dud, a mildly surrealistic farce involving a group of men -- all named Frank -- trying to get to a place known simply as Eira. Diehard fans of Kaurismaki will appreciate the arid existentialism, but the rest of us are left to gawk at a single sketch: the Franks performing, Blues Brothers-style, at a rock club (sample lyric: "Bad boys are coming to break your toys"). "Crime and Punishment" is an atypically earnest adaptation of Dostoevsky that, despite its finely paced structure and a decent performance by William Hurt look-alike Risto Aaltonen, ultimately disappoints. Sincerity, alas, is not Kaurismaki's strong point.
What Rob Reiner did for pretentious arena rockers in "Spinal Tap," Kaurismaki does for -- well, Finnish wannabes -- in his brilliantly wacky road movie "Leningrad Cowboys Go America." Going nowhere in their native land, the bizarrely dressed, outrageously coiffed Cowboys heed a bit of advice from a record exec: "Go to America. They'll put up with anything there." Soon they're driving from Memphis to Galveston in a vintage Cadillac, trying to win over the locals with their amusingly horrible renditions of "Tequila" and "Born to Be Wild," on their way to a wedding gig in Mexico. Like a dysfunctional family on vacation, they're a riot to watch; Kaurismaki adds to the levity with running jokes involving a dead bassist, a stingy manager, and a wayward village idiot.
Both "Ariel" and "The Match Factory Girl" -- the final installments in a trilogy about blue-collar striving -- find Kaurismaki in a much more bitter frame of mind.
In "Ariel," the director's best early effort, the chiseled Turo Pajala plays an out-of-work miner who hits the road with his life savings after his father commits suicide. ("Don't do what I'm about to do," the elder man counsels, walking into a bathroom with a pistol.) Falling prey to a mugger, he drifts around penniless in a white Cadillac, falls in love, and promptly lands in prison for beating up the thief who had robbed him.
Such ironies of fate abound in "The Match Factory Girl." Outinen, with her sleep-bruised eyes, gives an achingly good performance as a lonely assembly-line worker. Cruelly abandoned by her only lover after a single night, and barely acknowledged by her uncaring mother and stepfather, Iris seeks revenge with the same cold, mechanical efficiency as the factory machines Kaurismaki trains his camera on. A remarkably simple film of immense yet potent silences, it is, like most of this director's work, just under 75 minutes long. Brevity might be the soul of wit, but it is also, in Kaurismaki's black-comic universe of suffering, the mute cry of sorrow.
Damon Smith can be reached at demonurge@earthlink.net. 