Educational Media Reviews Online

Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki (The Man Without a Past, Drifting Clouds, Ariel, The Match Factory Girl) is in the spotlight of this sensitive documentary that juxtaposes his life against the backdrop of his films. In the opening scene, director Guy Girard’s camera approaches the renowned filmmaker typing a screenplay and crumpling the results in frustration. Cut to a clip from a Kaurismäki film where a man is holding a gun to his head when a sudden thunderclap startles him from his suicidal trance. Just as suddenly, we return to Kaurismäki’s studio to witness the arrival of a female journalist who has come to interview him. She is encroaching upon his thoughts, interrupting a rare moment of peace, complains Kaurismäki.

Throughout the video, dialog with the filmmaker alternates with well-chosen excerpts, creating a dreamlike narrative sequence. The seamless technique belies an inherent tension between Kaurismäki and the cinematic world in which he works. Cinema, says Kaurismäki, is not a real passion; he is interested in life. He bemoans Hollywood’s “vomiting of meaningless stories,” but seems nearly as disgusted by ivory tower intellectualizing. In the midst of much cigarette smoke and two glasses of white wine with ice cubes, a male Finnish journalist presses Kaurismäki to describe his vision of Europe in films like Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatiana. “Jimi Hendrix can tell you about Europe,” snaps the filmmaker, and the camera pans to a portrait of the American musician, affixed to a wooden wall overlooking Kaurismäki’s famous Honolulu Bar. Aki is impatient with smug questions. He’d rather talk about the essence of filmmaking, the struggle for life in a desolate world: “the western world is knowingly starving half the world. Our living standards are so high that half the world has to die.” Kaurismäki’s cinema is the one place where his artistic vision is never compromised. A sense of justice pervades. Despite absurd and demoralizing circumstances, his characters usually manage to stumble into a more hopeful existence.

In real life, the filmmaker is less hopeful, but he is well loved by those who work with him. Viewers are introduced to Kati Outinen and Elina Salo, signature Kaurismäki actors, whose blonde hair contrasts with the scarlet walls and sepia tone photographs surrounding them, including a portrait of Lenin. Relaxing on barstools, the women praise Aki’s “purity,” his ability to create a world “á la Hopper.” The filmmaker is noted for his distaste of excess, whether of speech, action or props. Preferring the most essential footage (Kaurismäki edits his own material); he discourages his actors from rehearsing their parts.

Girard’s film is essential for Kaurismäki fans and students of Scandinavian cinema or deadpan comedy, but it has its weaknesses. Most bothersome is its failure to identify the films excerpted and the actors interviewed. Regardless, it approximates an intimacy with the filmmaker unmatched in written interviews. For those who want to know what feeds Kaurismäki’s imagination, what the man is made of, watch his films— and watch this film.