In 2002, the Cannes Film Festival paid Aki Kaurismaki his due respect. The Man Without a Past received the Grand Prize of the Jury and his favorite actress, Kati Outinen, won for Best Actress. The award was well-deserved: the Finish filmmaker has become a leading cinematic figure in little over twenty years, with fifteen films to his credit, thanks to his disillusioned and affectionate style.
Above all, Aki Kaurismaki has proven his inimitable way of expressing the bleakness of the world and of the “little people” who inhabit it, antiheroes whose untiring equanimity render them both dignified and quirky. As the characters drag through the no man’s lands of urban and rural settings, they are somehow akin to Droopy, Tex Avery’s dog, and like him, seem to be saying, with a deadpanned expression, “You know what? I’m happy.”
With his sketchy minimalism and burlesque stylization, Aki Kaurismaki also depicts resistance against life in the fast lane and against a world that rejects anything that “doesn’t fit in.” With the mere image of a woman seated in a party waiting in vain to be approached, he manages to portray loneliness. A bouquet of flowers is enough to recount a nascent romance. His actors are not particularly good-looking, but through poetry and humor they incarnate the grandeur and the poverty of the human condition. His “loser trilogy” (Drifting Clouds, The Man Without a Past and Lights in the Dusk) and his previous “worker’s trilogy” (with the cinematic gems Shadows in Paradise, Ariel and The Match Factory Girl) are pathos-free portraits of “working stiffs,” losers of all sorts who try to survive in a hostile universe without ever forsaking their dignity.
That his films are so consistent, however, does not preclude them from being diverse. From the fold suddenly emerged Bohemian Life, in a reconstructed Paris, and Juha, in sumptuous black and white, “the last silent movie of the 20th century.” The DVD of his complete works especially offers viewers the occasion to treat themselves to several rarities, such as his musical short films, including the ineffable Those Were the Days, where a cowboy and his donkey seek refuge in a Paris café. And then there is Calamari Union, his second, but as yet unreleased, film, a sort of black and white, quick-paced sketch showing a group of dysfunctional, over-aged delinquents all named Frank who make their way across town (at their own risk!). The spirit of the “Leningrad Cowboys” – a very bad rock band with elaborate quiffs and extremely pointed boots, and a box-office success in 1989 – is already present.
Lastly, this complete set offers the chance to meet the “Kaurismaki family”. Indeed, the Finish director’s films are also a story of loyalty: the same director of photography from the very beginning, and several favorite actors, including Kati Outinen, with her chin pulled in, and her heart-rending and unsettling loneliness, and Matti Oulippää, an unflagging accomplice starting with his first appearance, hair parted on the side, in Crime and Punishment, and up to his early death. “I don’t understand why you’d need to replace the perfect actor by another one just for the sake of change,” he has said. “John Ford and Howard Hawks kept John Wayne in their Westerns because he was the best for that kind of role.”
Emmanuelle Mougne
Ferrare, Italy, 1938. The vast Finzi-Continis domain opens its doors to the middle-class youth when sports clubs access is suddenly denied to Jews. The rich Jewish noble family welcomes here their children’s friends. In this closed preserved space, Giorgio and Micol, only daughter of the family, live their lives, which grows from friendship to love for Giorgio.
Jean-Claude Brisseau was discovered by Eric Rohmer in 1975 at an amateur film festival, where his first movie, La Croisée des Chemins, shot in Super 8, was being screened. At the time, Brisseau taught French in a Paris-suburb middle school, a profession he exercised for more than twenty years. Shortly afterwards, he was hired by the Institut national de l’audiovisuel, which in 1978 produced his first feature-length film, La Vie Comme Ça (Life The Way It Is), initially made for television. His next films, shot directly for theatrical release, dealt with big-city cruelty and violence, both physical and psychological; into this urban reality he incorporated spiritual and metaphysical elements, the secret to his unique approach, and combined fantasy, social commentary and romance. Mysticism and irrationality abound in the urban housing developments of De Bruit et de Fureur (Sound and Fury, 1988) – the film made a name for him at the Cannes Film Festival that same year – and seep from the walls of the provincial abode in Céline (1992). He also offered unique roles to actresses with a strong public image, going against their usual current, whether it be Vanessa Paradis in Noce Blanche (White Wedding, 1989), her first movie role, or Sylvie Vartan in L’Ange Noir (The Black Angel, 1994), which costarred Michel Piccoli and Tchéky Karyo, while the mesmerizing music was composed by Jean Musy. Six years later, Jean-Claude Brisseau shot Les Savates du Bon Dieu (Workers for the Good Lord), starring Stanislas Merhar and Raphaële Godin; director and film-critic Louis Skorecki heralded the movie as “a sublime Hollywood melodrama, a cross between Under Capricorn and The Barefoot Contessa.” With Choses Secrètes (Secret Things, 2002) and Les Anges Exterminateurs (The Exterminating Angels, 2006), which was shown in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, he turned his attention to transgression and female desire in a singularly unprecedented way.