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Patrons of the New York Film Festival were disappointed last fall when two internationally acclaimed filmmakers did not come to the festival as planned. Abbas Kiarostami, the Iranian auteur whose latest film, Ten, is a fascinating and complex critique of the status of women in Iran, was unable to attend because the American government's new security measures require all visitors from his country to undergo a three-month background check. Upset that his world-renowned colleague was being treated like a potential terrorist, Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki—whose The Man Without a Past had become one of the hottest items on the festival circuit after winning the Grand Prix, the Ecumenical Jury Prize and the Best Actress award at Cannes just a few months before—announced that he would not come to New York either. In a faxed statement, he said he was forced to cancel his own trip because "if the present government of the United States of America does not want an Iranian, they will hardly have any use for a Finn, either. We do not even have the oil."
Kaurismäki's statement hints at the mix of droll humor and serious sociopolitical concerns that is characteristic of his films. Inspired by the quiet transcendence of Robert Bresson yet also by the poker-faced comedy of Buster Keaton, Kaurismäki's films are minimalist masterworks in which characters cope with economic hardships and blows to their pride by expressing as little emotion as possible and by speaking in sometimes cryptic phrases, many of which are delivered in a hilariously deadpan style reminiscent of Jim Jarmusch or Hal Hartley. ("Do you mind if I smoke?" asks one character in The Man Without a Past. "Does a tree mourn for a fallen leaf?" comes the peculiar reply.) Thanks to his subtle use of expressive music and bright, colorful visuals, there is also an oddly optimistic quality to Kaurismäki's tales of life on the margins of society, a quality that sometimes has clear spiritual overtones.
Kaurismäki's quirky blend of black humor and bleak social realism, with a few sly biblical references thrown in for good measure, is evident in a scene from Drifting Clouds, a 1996 film about a trolley driver and his wife, a maitre d' at a once-popular restaurant, who lose their jobs and struggle to make ends meet. After several of his attempts to find new work have failed, and after creditors have begun to reclaim his possessions, Lauri (Kari Väänänen) kills time at home by filling out a newspaper puzzle, and he asks his wife, Ilona (Kati Outinen), if she can think of any words that remind her of "needle."
"Heroin, morphine, haystack," she replies. Lauri, apparently oblivious to the theme of futility that runs through Ilona's answer, tells her that none of those words fits. "Camel, seam," she offers. The last word works, and Lauri turns his attention to the next clue, which concerns a man who came down from a tree; the answer is Zacchaeus.
And so, between the tax collector who gave half of his possessions to the poor and the camel that could pass through the eye of a needle more easily than a rich man could enter the kingdom of God, Kaurismäki makes two oblique references to biblical characters whose riches stood in the way of their salvation. The implicit lesson is that Lauri and Ilona should not despair, despite their hardships—if anything, their suffering could bring them closer to God—but the references also stand as a critique of the bankers and other wealthy individuals who remain aloof from the less fortunate.
Drifting Clouds was Kaurismäki's first film in a projected trilogy on unemployment, and The Man Without a Past, a more than worthy contribution to the ever-popular genre of films about memory loss, is the second. It begins with a man (Markku Peltola) getting off a train in Helsinki and walking to a nearby park, where he falls asleep on a bench and is promptly beaten by three thugs who leave him for dead. The man is taken to a hospital, where he dies in the early hours of the morning.
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