Tulitikkutehtaan tyttö / The Match Factory Girl

Following the order of the "Proletariat Trilogy" (only a trilogy in a thematic sense, thankfully), this one builds on the tone of the last two to be sure. The main difference that I see, the thing that separates this from its predecessors, is that Iris (the match factory girl in question) is the only main character in any of the three stories not already hardened by a certain kind of hopeless acceptance (read: surrender). She's still vulnerable, soft, and more to the point victimizable, because she's still full of hope and dreams. Part of what made Shadows in Paradise and Ariel interesting to me was the nonchalant hopelessness of the world, the way the characters had already given up trying, and took things like doors of opportunity opening up only to slam shut in their faces (in both case, due to untimely deaths) as part-and-parcel of what the universe had to offer. Notably in Shadows, within the first ten minutes, Nikander's friend and would-be benefactor says, "I'm not going to die behind the wheel." Nikander asks him, "Then where?" and without the slightest hint of irony or hesitation, he declares, "Behind a desk." There's no hope of avoiding misery and frustration and isolation. There's just choosing what you do in the meantime and how you go out. I think the reason Nikander and Kasurinen are able to find love is because they've accepted this, and so have the women they meet, and the romances are hilariously cold, straightforward, and gloomy. More like two people embracing so as not to freeze to death (so quickly) than two people hoping for any kind of joy from one another.

Iris, though, she hopes for something more. She's young, naive, and believes in love, and for that we watch her get punished by the world. What saves this from being an endlessly cruel story is her third-act turnaround, her (SPOILER) transformation (by failed suicide-by-auto?) from innocent starry-eyed wallflower into black comedy murderess. There's no question this one ups the blackness and the comedy from the last two. And it works, and it's funny -- and it's so streamlined, at 68 minutes long, that it couldn't possibly overstay its welcome. Plus, it helped me think out some "solitary humorous-pathetic" moments for the script I'm working on. Yet personally, I think my favorite of the three lies somewhere between Shadows and Ariel, somewhere closer to humor-from-hopelessness rather than humor-from-the-world's-cruelty. But I still love all three, and don't understand why nobody else knows of this guy. He falls into the same category as Teshigahara and Hong Sang-soo and many others, foreign filmmakers who are underrated (here), all tough to sell people on, but so rewarding once you bother. I guess I'll just keep pushing.

Ariel

For the first fifteen minutes or so of this film, it felt suspiciously like Aki Kaurismäki took the beat sheet from Shadows in Paradise and wrote new scenes with the exact same impact/plot, but when it veers away it's very satisfying. On the one hand it's fun to see the same style of story with ratcheted-up tension and stakes, almost like a more commercial "bleak-comedy" about desperate losers finding love. On the other, though, it makes for an interesting what-if, as things go from bad to worse and from worse to a lot worse, only to (SPOILER?) kind of work out in the end.

I'm really focusing more on tone and style than story, though, and there's a lot to digest here. Ariel feels funnier than Shadows (though my one big laugh was very meta, when Matti Pellonpää shows up sitting in a jail cell, looking almost exactly like he did in the last film... for a minute I expected him to introduce himself as Nikander, and for us to learn that things didn't end so well for him and Ilona), but also a lot darker, opening on a suicide and having so many guns and knives, thieves and robbers, throughout. The story consistently offers sight gags and ironic twists to keep the audience from overdosing on hopelessness, and like I think I said last time, what really saves it is that Kaurismäki isn't afraid to laugh at losers suffering desperation. It's the tenet of every writer worth his salt that the hero is the one who suffers the most -- sometimes it feels like you have an obligation to make as many things as you can go wrong -- but here we are invited to chuckle every time it does. It's as if he's saying "Look how depressing... isn't that funny?"

I wonder if there's any way I can pull this off in my story. I sure hope so, because this is the tone I'm going for here.

Varjoja paratiisissa (Shadows in Paradise)

There's a scene late in Shadows in Paradise when our hero Nikander, having won and lost his ferociously tepid love Ilona, where he's back at his night job translating English recordings into Finnish (or at least that's what I think he's doing). The snippet we catch goes as follows: "I was pretty well through with the subject. I'd probably considered it from most of its various angles, including the one that certain injuries or imperfections are a subject of merriment while remaining quite serious for the person possessing them. It's funny. It's very funny. And it's a lot of fun too, to be in love. Do you think so?" It's a strange monologue, and when he tries to play it back he finds it unbearable. He cannot face the lines, and he leaves his job abruptly, work unfinished. These lines are so awkwardly spot-on about this beautifully awkward story that they are jarring, confrontational, and yet they read like so many opaque lines of stereo instructions that you're not sure if you even got the meaning right. Maybe you imagined that it summed up the movie, but it felt like it did.

The tone here is just so delicate. I've never felt more invited to laugh at deadpan sadsacks as when watching an Aki Kaurismäki film, but it's never all that funny. What I didn't remember, and now find amazingly obvious, is how proto-Jarmuschian this is, reminding me of Ghost Dog, Broken Flowers, Limits of Control, and of course the similarly titled Stranger Than Paradise. Everything from little details like her portable stereo and the way they smoke to the general tone to the sedate way things never really boil over, and of course the more-bleak-than-black sense of humor. It's all very like where Jim Jarmusch would go, and curiously (but separately?) this film feels amazingly like a solution to a problem of tone and pacing to one of my scripts (The World of Missing Persons, only so noted in case I come back wondering). It's matter-of-fact and slice-of-life but with a tinge of absurdism. I really like it, even though on a certain level it seems (absurdly) like I'm watching cinema's first Aspergers romance. I'll have to revisit this one in the future when I get back to that script. Between Kaurismäki and Roy Andersson (Songs of the Second Floor and You, the Living), it seems like I'm constantly being inspired for my own films by contemporary Scandinavian cinema. Like I said, bleak-comic absurdism. I wonder what else is out there.

For now, sorry if my thoughts are all over the place. I had to crawl out of bed to write this, and now I'm going back to it. What are you gonna do?