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Is There Life After Bergman?
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20162 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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1 / 1992 |
1,996 Words |
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David D'Arcy
David D'Arcy broadcasts on cultural matters on National Public
Radio. |
From time to time, a characteristically Finnish lake or forest shows up in one of director Aki Kaurismaki's movies and, of course, the films are in Finnish, the language that has helped to isolate the Finns for centuries. But there is a lot of American in Kaurismaki's vision--the America of convicts breaking out of prison, or cars, highways, smoky bars, and small-time crooks that populated low-budget Hollywood movies in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Ariel, the best-known of his films to open commercially in the United States, is in part a classic road movie. A young miner leaves dreary Lapland in a white Cadillac convertible, takes up a life of crime, and finally flees the Finnish authorities with a disgruntled meter maid.
That story and those of his other films, says Kaurismaki, are departures from the way Finnish filmmakers usually emulated Hollywood. "Everybody else was trying to imitate Hollywood action," says Kaurismaki. "I was a little bit nervous, but I proved to myself that now you can make films of ordinary people, ordinary life." Ordinary life in Finland, seen through Kaurismaki's eyes, is a parody of Finnish gloom--virtually everyone drinks, kills himself, or just sits around bored. While that may be a particularly Scandinavian angst, it's a far cry from the spiritual vision of Ingmar Bergman. Still, Kaurismaki, with his visual signature and sheer determination, may be the one director from the Nordic region who can be described as Berman's successor.
Like Bergman's films, Kaurismaki's are far from ordinary in their mix of brooding and humor, and they're also ambitious. His first dramatic film was an adaptation of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. "Hitchcock said once that he wouldn't touch that book," says Kaurismaki. "It's too difficult. And I noticed he was right, but that was too late."
In The Match Factory Girl, Kaurismaki weaves a dark, often comic tale of revenge in which a young woman uses rat poison to settle accounts with her cruel mother and stepfather and with a business executive who rejects her after he's gotten her pregnant. I Hired a Contract Killer is Kaurismaki's homage to Franz Kafka (starring Kafka look-alike Jean-Pierre Leaud) and to the British director Michael Powell, to whom the film is dedicated. It's the story of a clerk who, after failing at suicide, hires gangsters to do the job. Leningrad Cowboy Go America traces a Finnish rock band's madcap journey from the frozen tundra to New York, and then by car to Mexico, to play at a
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