Ray Pride

How many of us, shy of a traumatic blow to the head, would be willing to start from nothing and nowhere and understand that breath itself is a gift?

Aki Kaurismaki's first film since 1999's "silent" "Juha" is a sweetly terse and brilliant comedy, supremely funny, from start to finish. Comparisons to Chaplin's unabashed sentiment are not unworthy. Here's how the accomplished 45-year-old Finnish director and world-class smart aleck synopsizes his film: " A nameless man comes to town and gets beaten to death in the first possible moment. So begins this epic drama, this film--or should we say a dream?--of lonely hearts with empty pockets under the big sky of our lord... or should we say birds?" From drabness comes transcendence as the lined and hangdog face of "M." (Markku Peltola) stumbles wide-eyed through the outskirts of Helsinki, meeting the dispossessed of the city, as he seeks his identity, and eventually, Irma, a Salvation Army officer played by Kaurismaki's luminous yet somber muse Kati Outinen, who may have the most full-to-brimming eyes in movies today.

"I wanted to make a film about homelessness without making it so socially declaring," Kaurismaki told Dave Kehr in the New York Times. "The idea of a man without memory, without a past, made it more like a B movie." Actually, what he's made is near indescribable, because the combination of seemingly anachronistic elements and a luminously shot lumpen milieu is so insanely simple and yet so emotional and unbelievably funny. Like M., Kaurismaki's deadpan rises from the grave. His scrupulousness that seems at first clinical and heartless, but with the accumulation of precise observation, paradoxically grows compassionate, then near its end, comic, and finally, sanguine. The buoyancy and toughness of Kaurismaki's flip-yet-weighty storytelling is matched by the ever-hopeful resilience of his downtrodden protagonists. "The Man Without a Past" is strange, timeless, optimistic and beautiful. Who else can make rain falling at a river's edge seem like the stuff of life itself? Plus, as always in Kaurismaki's comedies, there's a great dog.

In just over twenty years, the 45-year-old Finnish director of twenty-three features and shorts may be the most accomplished, gifted filmmaker known almost only to cinephiles. He did make headlines last fall when "The Man Without a Past" was programmed by the New York Film Festival. But when Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, who has visited the U.S. several times, was barred entry by the INS unless he went through a humiliating series of rituals, Kaurismaki, already reluctant to travel for health reasons, bowed out. What would you want with a Finnish film director if you don't want an Iranian, he reasoned. "We don't even have oil."

The ideal introduction on video for newcomers to this expressively inexpressive world would be "The Match Factory Girl," Kaurismaki's painful, hilarious masterpiece. Kaurismaki forged this gorgeous deadpan in a series of earlier movies like "Ariel," and there have been easy comparisons made between the sullen Finn's poker-faced comedies and the films of Fassbinder (a fascination with the losers of society), the economy of Bresson (Kaurismaki said "Match Factory Girl" should "make Bresson seem like a director of epic action pictures"), and Jim Jarmusch. There's a kinship to Jarmusch, but the funky looseness of that likable hipster's style is absent. "The Match Factory Girl" (1990) opens with shots showing the progress of a log through crude machinery to its destination within a wall of small boxes in the form of matchsticks. Iris, an inspector on the assembly line, is followed through her days with the same attention to routine. Kaurismaki shows life as it is lived, lunch as it is eaten. Iris is played by Kati Outinen, and as in "The Man Without A Past," her slight, hopeful smile at brief instants in the picture is truly affecting. And again, like "Man Without a Past," the plot's poignantly simple: she meets a man, becomes pregnant, she's disowned by her family, she seeks a kind of revenge (it's "Fatal Attraction" remade as "Diary of a Country Priest"). Kaurismaki's storytelling is parceled out in shots of painterly abstraction, heart-stopping moments of composition, color and texture. It's the intellectual transmuted to the purest emotion, cast in light that makes its world seem machined from gunmetal.

"The Match Factory Girl" was one of my favorite films of the nineties, and I can't tell you a recent movie that made me feel like individual expression in moviemaking is still possible more than "Man Without a Past." It's close to perfection. Have I made it sound arty? It's not; it's utterly accessible and I'll be back to see it again this weekend. I'll have to chime in alongside Kaurismaki's friend, Jarmusch, who's admirably to the point in his film criticism: "It's sad enough to make you laugh and funny enough to make you cry."

"Man Without a Past" opens Friday at the Music Box.

(2003-06-25)

Also by Ray Pride

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(2003-06-18)

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Behold "The Eye," a supernatural kiss from the other side, an eerie Asian sibling to "The Others."
(2003-06-18)

Short Runs
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(2003-06-11)

Tip of the Week
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The day the clown cried
(2003-06-04)

Renaissance mannerism
(2003-06-04)

Tip of the Week
(2003-05-28)

Short Runs
(2003-05-28)

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