Shadows in Paradise (Film Group Essay)

　

　


from an interview with Aki Kaurismaki
Kaurismaki: Have you ever been to Finland?

Interviewer: No.

Kaurismaki: Don’t go. Life is boring enough.

　

Aki Kaurismaki

Aki Kaurismaki directed Shadows in Paradise in 1986. It was his third feature length film. Kaurismaki’s first full-length movie was an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. He has since made a dozen additional movies. One of his films, Leningrad Cowboys go America (1989) has a cult following. Beyond any doubt, Kaurismaki is Finland’s leading film maker.

Kaurismaki and his brother, Miki (who often works with him) were raised in a provincial city in Finland. Kaurismaki took a degree from a Helsinki University in Media Studies and has spent his life making movies. He recalls that when he was a teenager, he attended a film club that screened a double feature of Luis Bunuel’s L’ Age d’Or and Flaherty’s Nanook of the North. Kaurismaki remarks that between those two films define the entire spectrum of what motion pictures can accomplish. (Not surprisingly, Kaurismaki is an admirer of the silent film comedians, particularly Buster Keaton – he has praised Keaton’s "pale silence.")

Kaurismaki spends half of each year in Portugal where he owns a house. Finland is cold and dark in the winter. Like most Finns, he is dour, pessimistic, misanthropic, reluctant to engage in any activity other than heavy drinking and chain smoking.

Kaurismaki’s best reviewed film The Man without a Past (2002) was nominated for an Oscar. The director refused to come to the Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles as a protest against the war in Iraq – "why would I go to party in a country that is at war?" His next film, Le Havre (2011) was selected for an American premiere at the New York Film Festival. Again, Kaurismaki was invited to attend. And, again, he refused to travel to the United States out of solidarity with the Iranian director, Abbas Kiastorami. (The State Department denied a entry visa to Kiastorami.)

Kaurismaki is married and his wife is said to be unfailingly cheerful, happy, and optimistic. Kaurismaki says that his wife is the only reason that he has not killed himself. When asked if he had any children, Kaurismaki said: "Too many." How many? he was asked. "None," he replied.

With his brother, Miki, Kaurismaki’s films comprise about one-fourth of the total production of movies made in Finland. Both Kaurismaki brothers are featured on their own Finnish stamps


from another interview with Aki Kaurismaki
Q (by interviewer): What defines the Finnish character?

A: (Kaurismaki): Melancholy.

Q: Why?

A: Lack of light. It’s biologically proven that you need light to survive. There is no light in Finland. When it is dark in the world, it is dark in the mind.

Q: Does this worry you?

A: I more or less know I will kill myself, but not yet.

Q: What would make you do that?

A: Misery.

Q: You are too much of a romantic .

A: Yeah, yeah. So I don’t shoot myself in the head. I shoot myself in the heart.

　


from another interview by Kaurismaki
Kaurismaki: I have made half my films sober and half my films drunk. But no one has ever been able to tell the difference.


The Proletarian Trilogy
Shadows in Paradise (1986) is the first film in a sequence of three movies that critics call Kaurismaki’s "Proletarian Trilogy." All films feature people employed in blue collar jobs yearning for an escape from their mundane existences. The other pictures in the trilogy are Ariel (1988) and The Matchfactory Girl (1990). These pictures are simply made and exemplify a sort of rock-ribbed classicism – the images are clear and the editing is, at once, lucid and emphatic. Although the films feature beautiful, and carefully designed compositions, there is nothing gratuitously pretty or ostentatious about the photography. Kaurismaki’s lights his shots for clarity and eschews anything like "atmospheric" effects. (He has said that he despises Martin Scorsese for his baroque style – he calls Scorsese’s bravura technique "disgusting" and says that Goodfellas, for instance, is the "worst film (he) has ever seen." If Kaurismaki hates Scorsese, his reaction to the kind of candied lighting in many of Spielberg’s films, those honey-like shafts of radiance piercing an oh-so-solemn Rembrandt-brown darkness, must be beyond words.) Kaurismaki doesn’t move the camera. He doesn’t track with his characters, or re-position to maintain focus on them – in general, Kaurismaki’s camera is static recording characters who are also, more or less, motionless. Notwithstanding the austerities of his style, however, Kaurismaki’s films are excitingly "cinematic" – his use of off-screen sound and space is impressive; he edits with razor-sharp exactitude, and employs the rawest of raw musical materials to underscore the mostly repressed emotional responses of his characters to the misfortunes that they face. Indeed, the director’s wild caterwauling soundtracks, often blues and rock-a-billy so primordial that the music seems to ooze blood, supply emotion that would otherwise be completely concealed. Kaurismaki, it seems, would be most comfortable making films with little or no dialogue and, instead, relying on musical cues that carry his meanings. In fact, Kaurismaki made a silent film in 1999, Juha, a 78 minute adaptation of a 1911 famous Finnish novel about a nasty city slicker who seduces and, then, enslaves a naive country girl. Similarly, Kaurismaki has made movies that consist mostly (or entirely) of musical numbers, most notably the Leningrad Cowboys trilogy, The Leningrad Cowboys Go America (1989), The Leningrad Cowboys meet Moses (1994) and the astounding Total Balalaika Show (also 1994) that documents a concert in Helsinki attended by 70,000 people featuring the punk-rock Leningrad Cowboys and Russia’s Red Army chorus, the Alexandrov Chorus. With his brother Miki, Kaurismaki also made a concert show about three rock bands performing to audiences on a vessel cruising around Finland Lake Saimaa, The Saimaa Gesture (1981).

Kaurismaki’s extraordinarily disciplined style comports well with the characters that his films portray. The people in Kaurismaki’s films are mostly silent, inexpressive and emotionally reserved to the point of near-catatonia. In Ariel, the hero’s father blows out his brains in dingy café in a mining camp somewhere in Finland’s northwoods. The father’s last act is to hand his son the keys to his car, an impressively finned, American-built nineteen-fifties cruiser. After he hears, the gunshot, the hero goes into the toilet and impassively looks into the camera – he displays no more emotion than a person might show to a bit of particularly nasty road-kill. Kaurismaki’s precision, however, as a film maker is so great that we can generally understand exactly what the characters are thinking – even without them saying a word. Indeed, the director’s fidelity to images as opposed to words as the vehicle for meaning give his movies the sort of objective, unimpassioned narrative clarity that we see in the silent films of D. W. Griffith or the early movies of Erich von Stroheim (for instance 1919 film Blind Husbands). The pictures tell the story and Kaurismaki is content to present the material to us in an unembellished manner – his shots are held for extended periods of time, but never for a showy or gratuitous purpose; rather, Kaurismaki holds the images long enough to let us extract each and every bit of meaning from the picture before cutting to another shot. The director’s actors don’t look like movie-stars and they are often filmed in ways that are unflattering. (In fact, Kaurismaki’s actors are generally highly regarded stars from Finland’s TV and legitimate theater.) Although he uses professionals in his films, Kaurismaki’s performers are so accomplished that they seem "natural" – their acting is nuanced, understated, and so highly expressive that they generally don’t need to say anything to communicate what they are feeling. Kaurismaki never indulges in "showy" emotion, symbolism, or expressionistic depiction of events. There are no hidden meanings in his films, no pretentious allusions to other cinema, no subtexts. His camera-work is fantasically clear but inexpressive. In a movie like The Matchfactory Girl, Kaurismaki shows machines splintering wood so that matches can be manufactured – he photographs this industrial equipment with the same dispassionate clarity that he depicts the multiple murders that the heroine commits: whether he is shooting a car crash or a love scene or simply a still-life of drinks left on a bar in a tavern, Kaurismaki employs the same literal-minded emotionally remote style.

Certain images and themes connect the three so-called "Proletarian" films. All films involve characters who attempt to break away from their morose and dull daily existence. At the end of Shadows in Paradise, the lovers plan a honeymoon holiday in Tallinn, that is, beautiful Estonia and the films shows the sea and seagoing vessels signifying escape – at least, temporarily. Ariel, the title of the 2^nd film in the trilogy, refers to name of another seagoing vessel, this boat bound for America. In the final scene in that movie, the protagonists plan to stowaway in the Ariel and, in that way, escape from Helsinki. Matti Pellonpaa, Nikander in Shadows in Paradise, appears as the best friend of the hero in Ariel. (Pellonpaa was, probably, Aki Kaurismaki’s best friend and his reliable drinking buddy – according to Kaurismaki, he was a true Bohemian, beholding to no man or institution, entirely free and fearless in expressing himself. He was a heavy drinker, chain-smoked, and died at age 44 of a heart attack. His greatest performance as the hero in Kaurismaki’s dead-pan adaptation of Henri Murger’s famous novel La Vie de Boheme, the source for Puccini’s opera La Boheme – Kaurismaki’s film based on the novel, shot in black and white, is least operatic imaginable.) The oppressed heroine in Shadows in Paradise is played by Kati Outinen who appears again as an even more intensely mistreated character in The Matchfactory Girl. All films feature a scrupulously mean, impoverished lower middle class milieu in Helsinki. The movies are uniformly very short – Shadows in Paradise is the longest at 74 minutes; Ariel is 72 minutes long and The Matchfactory Girl is a mere 69 minutes in duration. Despite their brevity, the films are crammed with action, although they never seem rushed – Ariel and The Matchfactory Girl have complex plots, involve crime, and, in the last film in the trilogy, there are a number of murders. The impression upon a viewer is similar in some ways the impressions that a reader derives from Joyce’s Dubliners – the characters are poor, entrapped, and the author of the work has complete, remorseless, and uncanny control over his material.

Kaurismaki’s films, like those of Ozu, generally resemble one another quite closely. The movies are wonderful but difficult to discuss. This is a characteristic of the classical style in film – there’s not a lot that can, or should be said, about a Howard Hawks’ picture or the mise-en-scene in a Buster Keaton movie. The classic style in films is hard to discuss because the film making seems completely effortless with effects that are achieved by seemingly invisible means – it is a kind of film making in which the director seems to submerge himself in the material, the opposite of a film by Fellini or Nuri Bilge Ceylan, a kind of "ego-less" moviemaking. Kaurismaki has continued to make the same kind of classically composed, serene, and dead-pan tragicomedies, although at a steadily diminishing rate. (Kaurismaki explains the long lapses between his pictures on the basis of his contempt for his films and his self-loathing – "I now know too much about movies and so it takes me forever to shoot something I would have accomplished in a few days twenty years ago," he has said.) People who interviewed him after the release of his most recent film, Le Havre (2011), have commented on his enormous intake of alcohol. Kaurismaki claims that Le Havre is the only one of his films that he can stand to watch. And, it is, indeed, a marvelous accomplishment – both beautiful and extremely funny, an ode to love among the unlovely in late middle-age. Like the films in his proletarian trilogy, much of Le Havre takes place in the shabby apartments and maritime bars around the titular French harbor. In this movie, people also are fleeing – but they are African immigrants seeking asylum in France. Le Havre stars Kati Outinen, who appears as the heroine in Shadows in Paradise and concludes with a rock and roll concert by Frenchman who calls himself "Little Bob." "Little Bob" looks like a midget version of Elvis Presley and must be in his sixties, but the man is all heart and his performance is a joy to behold. In my view, Le Havre, a tremendously humane and gentle film, is one of the very best pictures released in the last five years.

Kaurismaki claims that Le Havre is the first in a trilogy of three films about harbor-cities. But, so far, there’s no sign that these films will actually be made.