Ariel

There is nothing in Aki Kaurismaki's minimalist crime film, Ariel, (1988) that you haven't seen before.  But you've never seen this hackneyed material presented with such stoic elegance.  Although the plot is utterly familiar from a hundred B-grade movies from the thirties and forties, Kaurismaki's severe and economical style tricks the viewer into thinking that he or she is seeming something completely new. 

A coal-miner from Finland's far north loses his job when the mine where he works is closed.  The miner's father, also unemployed because of the mine's closure, hands his son the keys to the family car -- a huge be-finned convertible -- before excusing himself to commit suicide in the cafe's rest room.  The film's hero, a hapless laconic fellow named Taista, fires up the enormous convertible, withdraws all his money from the bank, and sets off for Helsinki to find his fortune in the big city.  It's pretty obvious that this is going to be a rocky road -- the garage housing the big convertible collapses as soon as the car is backed-out of the structure and, at his first stop at a hamburger joint in Helsinki, two thugs beat the hero senseless and steal all his cash.  (The Finnish demi-monde are haggard with slicked back greasy hair and look a lot like the elderly Jerry Lee Lewis -- everyone listens to bloody-raw rock-a-billy, ancient scratchy blues, or the last movement of Tchaikovsky's Pathetique symphony.)  Taista gets a job on the wharf, meets a meter maid who is ticketing his car whom he ends up marrying after exchanging about 15 words with her, and, then, finds himself committing various crimes in order to survive.  Crime doesn't pay and Taista gets thrown in the Big House.  With the help of a fellow prisoner, played by the sublime Matti Pellonpaa (this guy is the epitome of Kaurismaki's noble and doomed riff-raff), Taista escapes from the penitentiary.  (The escape from the penitentiary is filmed in about eight elegantly framed and brilliantly editing shots -- including a staple of every Big House film that I saw when I was a kid:  the escapees huddling in the darkness as searchlights sweep the landscape and sirens wail).  After some more adventures resulting in his buddy's death, Taista with his moll and her kid escape Finland, departing on the freighter Ariel for Mexico.  As the three refugees are ferried to the rust-bucket freighter, the soundtrack plays a Finnish pop star crooning "Somewhere over the Rainbow."  The film is crammed with action:  there are several violent deaths, people getting bashed on the head, knocked out and left in the cold overnight (a staple of all of Kaurismaki's films), suicides, prison breaks, a remarkably inept bank robbery, as well as love scenes and innumerable shots of people lighting cigarettes -- and all of this in 72 minutes.  The movie is shot modestly, but with impeccable classicism -- the camera is always located exactly where necessary to impart the maximum lucidity and clarity to the image.  Kaurismaki's color sense is extraordinary -- the lighting is limpid, naturalistic, but the images are punctuated by bright colors that act as exclamation points.  Everything is filmed with maximum economy:  a love scene consists of a shot of two people in bed facing the camera frontally and speaking without looking at one another or, even, touching -- except for occasionally shaking hands or knife-fighting, Finns don't seem inclined to touch one another.  The effect is like Jean-Pierre Melville at his most austere or, even, the films of Bresson:  each shot has a poster-like immediacy and is narrative -- that is, the picture contains an element that links it to the preceding and next shot in the plot sequence.  In many ways, Kaurismaki's mise-en-scene is more closely related to the way that silent pictures were constructed -- and, indeed, at the end of the nineties, Kaurismaki followed his tendencies in that direction by making a silent film, Jauhu. 

Finland seems to be a dimly lit wasteland, inhabited by the walking dead.  When Pellonpaa's gaunt thug bleeds to death, he somehow discovers the controls for the convertible's top -- the big awning opens and hums as it slides up and over the corpse.  Pellonpaa (who was to die of a heart attack at 40) mumbles:  "Bury my heart in the dump."  And the next shot shows, a shovel depositing earth that seems conspicuously full of shards of glass and decaying paper into a shallow pit.  This is followed by a shot of Taista with his pale, melancholy and loyal girlfriend and her tow-headed kid standing on the dark wharf.  It seems to be always twilight, just about dark.  Ariel is the second film in Kaurismaki's so-called "Proletariat Trilogy" -- as in the first picture, Shadows in Paradise, the movie ends with a sea-going vessel vanishing into the grey haze.  The only hope for Finland and the Finnish is to escape the place.