Aki Kaurismäki: "Where have all those years gone?"
The Finnish film director, wintering in Portugal, comes full circle with the final part of his "loser trilogy"
By Hannu Marttila in Oporto
It could be something out of a story by Ivan Turgenev, but it isn't:
It is late January and Siberia has moved in on Europe with a vengeance, but down here on the far south-western edge of the continent, the afternoon sun is already a little overly warm. From the city come sounds of singing, the calls of schoolchildren and street traders, the throaty gurgling noises of a coffee percolator, crockery and cutlery chinking, and the scent of roasted chestnuts.
What are they talking about, those two middle-aged men far from home, at a street café on the banks of the Douro?
They are talking about Ruoholahti.
Aki Kaurismäki has completed work on his fifteenth full-length movie. Laitakaupungin valot (Lights in the Dusk), which opens in Finland on February 3rd, completes the trilogy started ten years ago with Kauas pilvet karkaavat (Drifting Clouds). The success of this picture was followed up by Mies vailla menneisyyttä (The Man Without a Past), winner of the Grand Prize at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival.
Already before the third film was in the can, movie writers were referring to Kaurismäki's "unemployment trilogy", and even to a "Suomi trilogy", in the same way as Varjoja paratiisissa (Shadows in Paradise, 1986), Ariel (1988), and Tulitikkutehtaantyttö (The Match Factory Girl, 1990) had earlier been dubbed his "working-class trilogy".
"One is a working-class trilogy, and the other is a loser trilogy, but I don't know which is which", attempts Aki Kaurismäki with a deadpan expression, but he then resolves the problem-of-naming in favour of the garbage man, the miner, and the match factory worker.
The first two parts of the loser trilogy portray unemployment and homelessness, while in "Lights in the Dusk", the thematic focus is on loneliness.
"It is the story of someone who has been bullied at school or in the workplace."
In the film, which was shot in the commercial- and office-block canyons of the Helsinki district of Ruoholahti, life - through its various agents and representatives - smacks down a forlorn nightwatchman hard and in very concrete fashion. Unlike before, this time there is no human rights lawyer stepping in, sent by the Salvation Army, nor the solidarity and camaraderie of a group of other losers. When the movie has run its course, the betrayed and bludgeoned man lies dying on the ground.
In Kaurismäki's view, "Man Without a Past", with its cast of good and supportive souls, was "already insufferably sickly-sweet".
"Personally, I find the theme of bullying and being knocked around a more comfortable one than excessive optimism. There is no cause for optimism, not in the film nor outside it."
Luckily for our protagonist, the author of the film has a reputation of being a soft-hearted old man, so we can assume there is a spark of hope illuminating the final scene, writes the 48-year-old director in his own accompanying notes to the film.
"The initial idea for the film was a modern, exceptionally bleak suburban milieu and a battered individual, whom I'd have liked to batter and bully to death, but my soft side got the better of me", grins Kaurismäki.
The end of the movie is left open. The viewer can decide for himself or herself what happens to the nightwatchman Koistinen after the credits roll, promises the director.
My guess is an avalanche of votes for the small spark of hope.
Ruoholahti is in great part former docklands, now a growing urban suburb of apartments and offices. It is not the first time Kaurismäki has used this location.
"There were piles of sand and gravel all over Ruoholahti, and in 1984, when I shot Calamari Union there, Dave Lindholm played the guitar next to a brazier right where the main plaza is now."
The circle is being completed:
"I wanted to finish off this second trilogy with a small film, just like the first time. The two sets of three films - with a few other individual films besides - cover nearly a quarter of a century of the changes in the Helsinki landscape. I'd have to admit it was a bit of a labour to find a background to the drama from Ruoholahti, but I've filmed Helsinki inside and out already."
The Finnish film guru Peter von Bagh would probably speak of Aki as an Honoré de Balzac of Helsinki.
Who knows, he may yet make that comparison - we'll see when von Bagh's promised Kaurismäki book is completed in the spring.
During the production process, "Lights in the Dusk" went for a long time by the working-title of "The Nightwatchman".
"The name in the end is a bit forced, since at the time I was not exactly surrounded by a halo of inspiration, but the idea is to capture a bit of the image of Finnish crime films of the fifties, the sort of ones where [veteran actor and director] Åke Lindman played the mean villain with the chiselled face.
These bad guys drive ‘50s American cars and don't use mobile phones even when they are ringing in to grass someone out - "Proper crooks, not your IT-criminals of today", says Kaurismäki by way of clarification.
It has been four years since the completion of Kaurismäki's last feature film.
"Has it really been that long?"
There is a telling pause.
"Back in the day, I used to make three films a year, now it is one in three years, or in four. The old vim and vigour of youth has been blunted."
That earlier pace was way too fast, Kaurismäki admits: all the "messages" have just about been passed. What is left is telling stories.
"Then again, it is better to do it when you are young, because later it is too late. You are only young once, as Henri Murger headed the final chapter of his Scènes de la Vie de Bohème." The book was the source both for Puccini's opera and Kaurismäki's own film from 1992.
Kaurismäki ponders long and hard in silence.
"No, it can't be four years. What's happened to all the years in between?"
Could it be that work was unusually tough and sticky... audience expectations... your own demands for your work...?
"I haven't worked on this film before January-February of last year. I wrote the screenplay in a week at the end of February, and before that I suppose I thought about it for two or three months. It used to be that a weekend was enough for the actual writing work."
How is that possible? Haven't people in Finland learnt that you first write a script back home for a couple of years and then send it off to a consultant in London for polishing up?
"Don't ask me, I don't know. But the truth is that the script is the foundation on which the whole thing rests, and if it doesn't work, then nothing does, however you decide to point the camera."
Aki Kaurismäki is known for his precise screenplays, finished down to the last comma and stage instruction.
This can be seen from the script for "A Man Without a Past", subsequently published in book form, which the writer compares to one of those three-dimensional wooden puzzles where you have to fit together the pieces just so. No single element could be removed without destroying the overall logic, and this is by no means only a good thing.
In this respect, the script for "Lights in the Dusk" performs surprisingly poorly, reveals Kaurismäki.
"It was almost just a skeleton. I set off confidently thinking I could put flesh on the bones and the script would start to work. And it almost does work, apart from a few passing dramaturgical glitches here and there."
At the Berlin Film Festival in 1994, Aki Kaurismäki announced he was giving up film-making. Later we heard that the director was intending to withdraw to Greece to write a novel. Two years later he made a comeback, bearing "Drifting Clouds", which turned out to be the best-received and most successful of his films to that point.
The entire Greece thing was a red herring, a mask through which he sought to protect his current second home, Portugal.
"Portugal was such an innocent country that I did not want to advertise it to tourists."
Through spending sixteen winters in Portugal, just outside Oporto, Kaurismäki has seen the country changing rapidly.
"In the late 1990s, in the space of about five years, Portugal went through the same sort of development process that Finland experienced between the early 1960s and the ‘90s. I tried to stand in the middle of the road, waving my arms and saying: ‘Hey, I've seen this before, don't do it'. But nobody listened."
For all that he has spent so much time in the country, Portugal does not feature in Kaurismäki's films, with the exception of the five-minute short Bico from 2004. This piece about the decline of a Portuguese hill-village was part of the portmanteau-film Visions of Europe, bringing together segments from 25 European directors.
"I don't believe I will ever make a full-length feature about Portugal; it would require a greater understanding of the details of everyday life here. At one point I was going to make Juha [released in 1999] here, as a talkie and in colour. I was already writing it when I suddenly realised I did not have the local knowledge to say what the main character would have taken with him as a snack when he went off to herd sheep."
As it turned out, Juha became a black & white silent, and more Finnish than pine, lakes and sauna combined.
Kaurismäki has been following the Presidential Election opinion poll projections from online news sources. He has declared himself to be a supporter of Tarja Halonen.
When it came out after the interview that this piece would be published on the actual election day, Kaurismäki grunted: "Huh. Well, if I'd known that, I'd have stuck to talking about politics."
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 29.1.2006
Previously in HS International Edition:
Monsieur Charismatique goes to Cannes (28.5.2002)
Links:
Internet Movie Database: Aki Kaurismäki
Finnish Film Foundation
Aki Kaurismäki (Virtual Finland)
HANNU MARTTILA / Helsingin Sanomat
hannu.marttila@hs.fi
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Aki Kaurismäki: "Where have all those years gone?"
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