![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
XIII: Varjoja Paratiisissa (Shadows In Paradise (Aki Kaurismäki, 1986)
XIV: Ariel (Aki Kaurismäki, 1988)
XV: Tulitikkutehtaan Tyttö (The Match Factory Girl (Aki Kaurismäki, 1990))
I suspect the first brochure for the Nottingham Broadway Cinema I saw - announcing a Beat generation season - mentioned Kaurismäki, probably Hamlet Goes Business. It has taken me twenty plus years, maybe twenty-five to catch up. His films are fantastically economical - seventy, eighty minutes, not a frame wasted whilst not rushed. They build entire worlds. It's been a month since I saw these, and I need to play catch up, so I'll be brief.
Varjoja Paratiisissa is a love story for the antiromantic realist; it's the sort of thing that quirky directors do in independent US cinema these days: lovers who settle, for whom a declaration of love would be overegging the pudding. Here a refuse man meets a supermarket clerk, and they get together. They drink coffee, they smoke cigarettes, they play bingo. What more is there?
Ariel is the perhaps unobtainable, the escape, in the film of that name. Taisto Kasurinen's coal mine has been closed and his father commits suicide, and then he is mugged and robbed. There's a love affair, a miscarriage of justice and ... well, deadpan wins out and charms utterly.
Iris is The Match Factory Girl, in a dead end job, who gets pregnant thanks to an unfortunate one night stand. But whilst Kaurismäki's heroes tend to be passive, here Iris seeks agency, and seeks bloody, albeit deadpan, revenge - putting the dead into deadpan. Beautifully judged.
XIV: Ariel (Aki Kaurismäki, 1988)
XV: Tulitikkutehtaan Tyttö (The Match Factory Girl (Aki Kaurismäki, 1990))
I suspect the first brochure for the Nottingham Broadway Cinema I saw - announcing a Beat generation season - mentioned Kaurismäki, probably Hamlet Goes Business. It has taken me twenty plus years, maybe twenty-five to catch up. His films are fantastically economical - seventy, eighty minutes, not a frame wasted whilst not rushed. They build entire worlds. It's been a month since I saw these, and I need to play catch up, so I'll be brief.
Varjoja Paratiisissa is a love story for the antiromantic realist; it's the sort of thing that quirky directors do in independent US cinema these days: lovers who settle, for whom a declaration of love would be overegging the pudding. Here a refuse man meets a supermarket clerk, and they get together. They drink coffee, they smoke cigarettes, they play bingo. What more is there?
Ariel is the perhaps unobtainable, the escape, in the film of that name. Taisto Kasurinen's coal mine has been closed and his father commits suicide, and then he is mugged and robbed. There's a love affair, a miscarriage of justice and ... well, deadpan wins out and charms utterly.
Iris is The Match Factory Girl, in a dead end job, who gets pregnant thanks to an unfortunate one night stand. But whilst Kaurismäki's heroes tend to be passive, here Iris seeks agency, and seeks bloody, albeit deadpan, revenge - putting the dead into deadpan. Beautifully judged.
