The Triumph of Finnish Working Class Cinema, Weekly Reel #64
With the recent release of “Fallen Leaves,” Aki Kaurismäki proves once again that working class cinema doesn’t need to be a try-hard pop-hit à la McKay and others.
News of the Week: I reviewed a book about war on film, so check that out when you have the chance. It’s long and at times tedious because of the subject-matter: is an anti-war film possible, how powerful films are in shaping images of war and ideology, and how the genre has shifted over time. I take the critical route because of the author: at times gargling insane theses obscured behind a staccato writing style, tending towards Russia apologia and Liberal-Boomer politics, and failing to contextualize whatsoever on issues/films brought up.
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The Proletariat Trilogy: Shadows in Paradise, Ariel, and The Match Factory Girl (1986/1988/1990, Aki Kaurismäki, Finland/Sweden—only for the third) is a non-contiguous, loose thematically based trilogy about working class Finns. Whether making one of these films, one of the “Loser trilogy” films, another installment in the Leningrad Cowboys adventures, or short music videos, Kaurismäki is always on the cinematic move, looking under every crevice and ill-lit corner of bars within Helsinki’s city limits. He dominated a stylistic corner of the international art film market in the late nineteen-eighties when his good friend Jim Jarmusch was dragging American cinema into the indie-film era. Starting in 1983 Kaurismäki released a film almost yearly until the late nineteen-nineties, which turned into every three, four, five, six years. The earlier films focus on Finnish working class characters while the latter films center on working class attitudes towards immigrants and other contemporary (post-Soviet) issues. His latest release, Fallen Leaves—which I reviewed for the Munich Film Festival, returns to the theme of his earlier films and is more of a re-imagining/update of Shadows in Paradise rather than a fourth entry into the long-ago closed loop trilogy.
Shadows in Paradise stars long-time Kaurismäki collaborators, Matti Pellonpää and Kati Outinen; he’s a garbage collector and she’s a grocery store check-out clerk. They meet and slowly, methodically, dryly, fall in love. He takes her to a bingo center on their first date. Their on-again off-again solidifies into something stronger when she loses her job and steals the cash box, which sends the cops looking for her. He successfully puts the box back in the office, which frees her. Ariel stars two-time Kaurismäki collaborator Turo Pajala and one-time collaborator Susanna Haavisto. After losing his mining job, he goes to Helsinki for work but ends up in destitution after he’s robbed. While sulking about looking for odds-and-ends, he meets and quickly falls in love with the meter-maid ticketing his car. Then he’s imprisoned after pulling a knife on the man who’d mugged him, where he becomes cellmates with Matti Pellonpää. The Match Factory Girl brings back Kati Outinen, who leads the film without a male lead. She lives at home with her parents, who works and pays the rent herself. Wanting to go out and meet people at dance bars, she has a one-night stand that leads to a pregnancy. Her parents kick her out and it ends with a Lady Vengeance-esque spree.
At a total runtime of three hours of thirty-five minutes, the Proletariat trilogy is only nine minutes longer than Killers of the Flower Moon and thirteen minutes shy of The Fellowship of the Ring extended edition. Most of Kaurismäki’s earlier films fail to reach more than eighty minutes, which makes his longest film, La Vie de Bohème, at one hundred and three minutes, feel like an unedited director’s cut that he was lucky to get past producers. And for all the talk of wanting shorter films, why weren’t they chimping for more filmmakers like Kaurismäki? (imo, films should either be ninety minutes or less— like Kaurismäki—or four hours—Oppenheimer can easily add another hour of footage with Kitty, Jean, and other nerdy science details.)
Kaurismäki has achieved a modern relevance that’s made his humble Finnish indie beginnings feel far away. He’s been a regular at Cannes since 1996’s Drifting Clouds, which culminated in a Grand Prix in 2002 for The Man Without a Past and a Jury Prize for Fallen Leaves last May. While he’s been a regular for Jussi awards (Finland’s top film industry awards show—starting in 1944—the year they ceased fighting with the Soviet Union and one of the oldest film awards in Europe) since the beginning, foreign audiences warmed to his sympathetic portrayals of working class people in the End of History era.
Nonetheless, from beginning to end, Kaurismäki has retained his unique auteur style of filmmaking that makes his films immediately recognizable (besides from being short and Finnish): minimalist, dry humor, deadpan deliveries, one-shot takes, simple inciting incidents and resolutions, a vibe wavelength [graphed something like: f(x)=0.1sin (x+1) where the y-axis stretches all the way up to fifty] with low-slow peaks over time, mustaches, slick-backed hair, drinking in various bars, karaoke and dancing, cold cold coldness, low-level employment opportunities and shifty bosses, nonchalant death/suicide, still cameras, chiaroscuro lighting, characters facing challenges against the odds according to their financially limited positions, survivalism, and a hearty Welcome to HELSINKI. These traits can all be found in the thirty-seven years between Shadows in Paradise and Fallen Leaves. (His style is so contagious that the two main actors of Fallen Leaves during a Q&A after its German premiere seemed to still be in character, answering in the witty pokerfaced affectations typical of Kaurismäki characters.)
Back to the Proletariat Trilogy. Shadows in Paradise features the best of two Kaurismäki regulars, as mentioned before, Matti Pellonpää— who appeared in eighteen of Kaurismäki’s films and could’ve appeared in more if not for his heart attack at age forty-four—and Kati Outinen, who play as co-leads and feature a pair of the most evocative faces to appear on screen. What Kaurismäki importantly doesn’t do, in this film and others, is glamorize working class life for melodramatic effect. Even as Ariel and The Match Factory Girl revel in genre conventions that tends to re-focus the attention of their material conditions, Shadows in Paradise remains the story of two people falling in love despite the fact that they have nothing with no prospects, hence the title. They resemble Chaplin characters, like in City Lights, who is very consciously an inspiration for Kaurismäki: “In my opinion, Chaplin is the best ever. He created Hollywood - for good and bad - and cinema the way we know it today. I like very much Ozu, Bresson, Marcel Carné, but Chaplin is still the best - he kept it simple.” Aka, keep it simple stupid, as a filmmaking ethos. This is why Fallen Leaves feels like a more conscious re-do of Shadows in Paradise, which features an adopted dog named “Chaplin” and the lead actresses working at a grocery store.
Ariel features more of him than her. It also features a second act jail plot that pairs him with cellmate Matti Pellonpää, whose every frame on screen release a gut punch of humor that only a solitary-sitting Pellonpää can cause. Whereas Shadows in Paradise is more realistic in its circumstantial conditions, Ariel has violence, death, guns, big amounts of money, and Bonnie & Clyde style romanticism. It's a sequel in the sense that this is the fantasy that plays out when people are down on their luck, sleeping in communal rooms with shit day-labor jobs. As with the height of gangster films during the Great Depression, people would rather watch someone in their condition reach a level of infamy, against the odds, even with death being a likely outcome. Ariel is the film that Pellonpää and Outinen would go see on a date, like the pair in Fallen Leaves watching Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die. Needless to say, it’s a masculine fantasy that almost necessitated, I’m guessing, a third from her perspective in the rumblings of a trilogy.
The Match Factory Girl features nearly only her. It brings back Outinen to lead this story about a woman abused on all fronts: job, parents, and man. Her awakening/arc leads to a conclusion unlike any other in Kaurismäki’s filmography, which is surprising and the perfect denouement to what the trilogy had incited from the beginning. Unlike Ariel, The Match Factory Girl isn’t a straightforward genre film; it lives more on the plane of Shadows in Paradise until act three. This final film in the trilogy is often regarded as the best, partially because the plot focuses entirely on one person, as opposed to a pair. This focuses our attention, increases our empathy, and allows for more character development than usual.
In interviews, Kaurismäki regularly espouses left-leaning political opinions and argues that he makes his films explicitly to comment on issues affecting Finnish, and by extension European in general, society. He usually employs short quips when asked the banal questions of the trade press; for instance, when asked about Cannes over time: “Back in 1996 it was different. There were less BMW and Audi cars, and US warfare. Now I love Cannes in an Audi.” He was fan of Labour and Angela Merkel and specifically made The Other Side of Hope—winner of the Silver Bear at Berlinale—to show Finns the life of an immigrant as opposed to the ideological talking points made by conservatives about being in some kind of war. (It may seem odd now, in November 2023, to talk about charged political environments, but 2016-17 was more insane than people remember, I believe, which the review below also mentions.) He’s against Finland’s entry into NATO this year: “Finland is a democracy and some people obviously wanted to join. But personally, I would have said no to it. Independence is your only defence.” The point: Kaurismäki provides a blueprint on how to make political films as opposed to the whining Liberal hand-wringing of many American filmmakers. Kaurismäki makes films about people, who are working class, but doesn’t dramatize to the deafening point of Hollywood—Bel Air, Calabasas, Beverly Hills, WeHo, Brentwood, Santa Monica, Malibu, Sherman Oaks—condescension, which only turns into counter-point fodder for the more maniacal conservatives. Culture wars distracting from real issues 101.
I’ll leave you with this final Kaurismäki line, about his long relationship with collaborators: “I have the same crew since 1983. We don’t have to talk - we whistle.”
The Proletariat Trilogy is streaming on Mubi.
Pass (but also a sneaky Save for Later)
Cat Person (2023, Susanna Fogel, USA/France) is the adaptation of Kristen Roupenian’s now infamous short story published in the New Yorker in 2017. The story quickly achieved viral status, a near impossible feat for modern short fiction, because of its contemporary subject matter dealing with dating in the world of smartphones and ghosting. (More recently it came out that Roupenian had plagiarized the story from a uni friend of a friend, who told her a similar story which she used to gain her own reputation, sans citation.) But the real reason it blew up was because it coincided with the red-hot #metoo movement, a year after the “grab ‘em by the pussy” tape and eleven months into Trump’s presidency. Pussyhats were everywhere and the atmosphere was charged and ready for shit to pop off. Ronan Farrow had finally published his investigative piece on Harvey Weinstein less than two months before “Cat Person” in the same magazine, which led to the Weinstein effect we’re all familiar with today. And in a case of Life imitating Art, as Wilde liked to have it, many people had read into the short story their own stories of casually dating via ‘toxic masculinity’ gone wrong.
The movie, which had a Sundance premiere to below average critical reviews, traces many of the shapes from the short story but makes it far goofier because of the casting of Cousin Greg, Nicholas Joseph Braun, and Best Picture winner of the 94th Oscars CODA’s lead actress, Emilia Annis I. Jones. The film ends act two with the mic-drop “whore” text-chain final line of the short story, but unfortunately adds one of the worst genre-dictated act threes of all time after that. “There hasn't been a third act collapse this bad since Clippers-Rockets 2015,” wrote film critic David Sims on Letterboxd, indeed. It’s worse though, because it completely undercuts the entire unevenly paced film and conclusively ill-terminates any understanding of wtf happened.
For much of the film, especially as their hook-up heats-up, I couldn’t help but cringe and hold my hands above my heart to prevent a cardiopulmonary arrest. When Greg played Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence,” I laughed so hard out of uncontrollable angst that each of the four other people in the 193-seat Neues Off must have heard the gargling cry for help. My tumbler filled with red wine couldn’t even calm the nerves. I had had that magical experience of enjoying a film for being so bad, the kind of experience I usually don’t go for through my antipathy towards feigned, ironic viewing. While this description should probably make this a “Save for Later” film, I couldn’t do that to the normies. For those who enjoy ironic viewings, this film is perfect and should be watched with a date or sig. other, bonus points if it’s a first or second date that leads to shitty sex.
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