Thursday, May 22, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Film: Finn de siecle

Aki Kaurismaki deploys droll Finnish humor in The Man Without a Past

By Jeannette Catsoulis

For many foreign films that resist categorization, finding an American audience is often a challenge of marketing. The Man Without a Past, Finnish director Aki KaurismŠki's second installment in his Finland Trilogy, is a perfect example: a comedy that never makes you laugh out loud, a romance devoid of beautiful people or teasing dialogue, a socially conscious message filled with hope instead of despair. The Man Without a Past is Ken Loach on cannabis.

"I tried to make a hopeful film...because everything is kind of wrong nowadays," explained KaurismŠki after winning the Jury Prize at Cannes last year. Like Jim Jarmusch, with whom he's often compared, KaurismŠki is a master of minimalism and deadpan humor, and his characters have the sweetly gentle passivity of those whose circumstances afford them little agency. His new hero, a hulking metal worker known only as M (Markku Peltola), is plunged immediately into victimhood: Alighting from a train in Helsinki, where he has come to find work, he is brutally beaten and robbed. Pronounced dead at the hospital, he recovers, venturing out into his new life swathed in bandages and with neither memory nor shoes.

KaurismŠki wants us to see that, after death, the only road is up--however unappealing that road may appear. M is adopted by the town's impoverished waterfront community of squatters and ragtag entrepreneurs; along with the Salvation Army, they feed him and find him an abandoned freight container to live in. Soon he is restoring an old jukebox filled with American blues, helping Salvation Army musicians find their groove, and falling hard for one of their number, a dour blonde named Irma (Kati Outinen, winner of Cannes' 2002 Best Actress award).

The Man Without a Past is a curious mix of hard surfaces and soft centers. Irma has fire beneath the ice, and an initially forbidding security guard reveals unexpected kindness. Even a massive mutt bearing the name of Hannibal is more pussycat than dog. And though the film is filled with images of trash and struggle, the gray vistas are splashed with gobs of unexpected color and the moaning wind on the soundtrack is repeatedly interrupted by the bounce of American rock music. This mixture of droll and dry, color and grimness, pop and pain gives the movie a strange and guilty giddiness, like telling a joke at a funeral; but KaurismŠki wants us to notice the hues and sounds of capitalism in the midst of the meanest of lives.

Even more than an acknowledgment of blue-collar stoicism or the kindness of those who have nothing, KaurismŠki's film is a call to identify with society's outcasts. Repeatedly denied work--and even suspected of a crime--just because he has no memory or bank account, the lovably pathetic M is labeled an "insubordinate" by the system and refused access to social services. But the blow to our social conscience is delivered with a joke rather than a lecture as an electrician refuses M's offer of payment for work he has done: "If you see me face down in the gutter, turn me on my back," he suggests as an alternative.

The Man Without a Past is a film with a great deal of the past on view, from vintage R&B to the colors of Douglas Sirk and the gentle sadness of Chaplin. For a while, at the beginning of the film, M is silent and believed mute. "I just haven't had anything to say," he explains when he eventually breaks his silence. A condition fortunately not shared by KaurismŠki.