CHAPTER 19

FINNISH CHARACTER: AKI KAURISMÄKI’S ARIEL

The Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki sees humor as a black, defensive response to the bleakness of a particular type of human existence, as well as to the way that this existence has been charted in previous (mostly American) films. “Existence” for Kaurismäki in Ariel (1988)—as in the two films with which it forms the Proletariat Trilogy, Shadows in Paradise (1986) and The Match Factory Girl (1989)—is limited to the down-and dirty, proletarian variety: no seamstresses or bakers here, but miners and maids, all of whom are nonetheless lonely people seeking if not finding life companions, or finding if not seeking them. Thus does the trilogy play on the conventions of movie romance, the sad as well as the happy kind. In The Match Factory Girl, for instance, the pregnant factory worker, deserted by her well- to-do lover, buys rat poison—only to use it on the “rats” in her life instead of herself. As in his earlier films Crime and Punishment (1983) and Hamlet Goes Business (1987)—the then thirty-one-year-old Kaurismäki had made four features in the previous five years (all with screenplays by him), and it’s reported that he and his older brother, Mika, also a director, are still responsible for over a third of the output of the meager Finnish film industry—Ariel immediately refers us, not to studio movies, but to a major work of Western literature. But the reference is ironic, as it is in the two earlier films, since Ariel is not in the least about a character who resembles the airy, magical, liberating spirit of The Tempest, nor is it about any kind of Jerusalem. (Ariel means “lion of God” in Hebrew and is a name applied to the Holy City in the Old Testament.) Regularly lifting his storytelling from classic literature—from Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare, to name only two authors— Kaurismäki reduces their grand dramatic upheavals and transcendent philosophical concerns to the context of the drab, hemmed-in, nearly hermetic existences led not only by miners and maids, but also by assembly-line workers, restaurant employees, and garbage men. The acting in Ariel, as in The Match Factory Girl—indeed, as in this Finnish director’s numerous films to date—may seem superficial, but it is not. (The writer- director by now of over twenty-five features and shorts since his 1981 début picture, the music documentary The Saimaa Gesture, Kaurismäki, in his productivity as well as his presence, has by now become to his generation of Finnish filmmakers what Jörn Donner [born 1933] was to the previous one.) This is because Kaurismäki’s characters tend to lead dead-end existences that have naturally deadened their spirits, and they are not offered very many emotional outlets or stimulants. Playing such characters, as Kati Outinen sympathetically did first in Kaurismäki’s Hamlet

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Goes Business and then in The Match Factory Girl, may appear easy but is in fact difficult, for it requires intense concentration, the subtlest of suggestion, and rigorous self-control, even self-denial. In other words, such acting calls for more than simply “doing nothing,” and all the more so, paradoxically, in films where the characters talk so little. (You can find similarly understated dialogue, and acting, in the films of Kaurismäki’s contemporaries, the American Jim Jarmusch and the Japanese Takeshi Kitano, as well as in the cinema of his closest artistic ancestor, the German Rainer Werner Fassbinder.) Often in Kaurismäki’s cinema, not a word is spoken by the characters for minutes at a time, and for the rest of time, which includes a number of accentuating long takes, conversation is limited to brief utterances or fleeting exchanges. Indeed, most of the speech we hear in these Finnish films comes, not from the characters, but from the televisions and movie screens they watch together with the radios and jukeboxes they listen to. These are people who not only are isolated within the frame, even when they occupy it along with someone else, but whose bodies are also occasionally fragmented by the frame into anonymous limbs, torsos, or extremities, and who are regularly excluded from it altogether. Such exclusion occurs during temps mort, or “dead time”—when the camera photographs an empty room or street, prior to a character’s entrance into the frame, or holds on a location after the character has departed—which Kaurismäki uses in this film, often before as well as after the same scene, more than in any of his others, and more than any director in recent memory with the exception of Jarmusch (who coincidentally was one of the actors in Kaurismäki’s Leningrad Cowboys Go America [1989]). Unlike Ozu, Antonioni, Bresson, and Jarmusch, Kaurismäki uses “dead time” less as an anti-”action” device—as a way of making his fiction give up some of its screen-time to the world from which it was drawn, for the purpose of calling attention to the mystery, inviolability, and ultimate stasis of that world— than as an anti-human one. That is, so insistent is his use of “dead time” (at least once creating nearly an entire sequence out of it: the opening one depicting the mechanized matchbox factory) that he seems intent, not only on registering the sublime indifference of the physical world to the problems and needs of his characters, but also on positing this people-free world as a comically serene alternative to the deadly one defiled by human cruelty, imperfection, and torpor. Like the other members of the Proletariat Trilogy, Shadows in Paradise and The Match Factory Girl, Ariel chronicles the dour existence of the Finnish working class. (The remoteness, even solitude, of the Finns—especially the men—has something to do with their severe Scandinavian climate but more, I suspect, with their fuzzy [inter] national identity. For generations the Finns existed under the political dominance of the Russians in the cultural shadow of the Swedes—a condition made worse by their “isolating” language, the only one in Scandinavia that is not of Indo-European origin.) Kaurismäki’s unostentatiously minimalistic style in these films, in which he shoots one (uninflected) action or movement or gesture, one (suppressed) emotion, one inaction at a time in uninterrupted time, and where he limits his focus to a

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