the kindness of strangers
by
Douglas Messerli
Aki
Kaurismäki (writer and director) Mies
vailla menneisyyttä (The Man Without
a Past) / 2002
It’s
a wide generalization, but I’d argue that most comedies these days are not all
that naturally funny. Their humor derives, often, from a kind of maniacal
series of events which reveal the absurdity of life along with the bad-boy and
bad-girl behaviors of their characters.
Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki (who
often writes, directs, and produces his own films), although entirely
contemporary in his stories, seems more like a director out of another era, a
bit like Pierre Etaix, Buster Keaton, Jacques Tatti, and even Gregory La Cava’s
My Man Godfrey, whose films feature
sad clowns, men and women who do not even perceive their lives as somewhat
tragic but who simply suffer the “slings and arrows” which they almost expect
to daily survive. It is only the viewer who perceives their suffering as beyond
the normal, which reduces their lives to something that is painfully laughable
from our presumably happier perspectives. And like those great comedic
directors, Kaurismäki’s heroes are made more loveable by their unknowing
recognition that they might be contemporary Jonahs.
Indeed, you might almost say that the
hero of the now-fifth film I’ve seen of this director, The Man Without a Past, might be truly said to have been swallowed
up in the wail (if not whale) of uncaring contemporary society. M (Markku
Peltola), perhaps a reference to his identity as “man” but surely not without
the overtones of Fritz Lang’s child murderer, has arrived in a city
(evidently Helsinki) with only one bag. He clearly is at the end of existence,
with nowhere to go and utterly exhausted: he falls to sleep immediately upon
arrival on a park bench.
Lest you think that the highly touted Scandinavian-Finnish
society is filled only with wealth and kindness, Kaurismäki immediately
introduces us to three local thugs (Clark Coolidge and I were threatened by
just such figures on our one night in Helsinki, and I encountered other
versions of Finnish brutes in Estonia as well), who immediately beat the
sleeping visitor, rob him of any money he has in his billfold and steal most of
the useable contents of his baggage before again beating him with a bat into
near-death amnesia.
M wakes up in a hospital, having been
already pronounced brain-dead by the doctor, and inexplicably detaches himself
from his life-saving tubes, staggering away, collapsing at the edge of a small
body of water where, nearby, poor Helsinkians have been forced to seek
residences in cargo containers.
Two young brothers find him and carefully
bring him “home,” where, despite their own destitution their gentle father and
caring mother shares their simple means of gruel, onions, and rice with the
stranger, forcing the food into his mouth, cleaning his bandages, and gradually
restoring him to “health.”
Like these outsiders, the sad-sack
visitor, now must face a society that demands identification and history in
order to even help with aid and public support. A man with no memory has no
place in this well-run near-socialist society.
Yet M, finding a kind of “landlord”
willing to rent him a nearby container in which to live—although threatening
him with a brutal dog attack if he doesn’t pay up—he calmly cleans, turning this
squalid space into what almost appears a true home.
Finding a job is almost impossible, but
the good services of the Salvation Army, which provides these poor folks with
regular meals, and the kindness of the hard-faced Irma (Kaurismäki regular Kati
Outinen) eventually leads to a job and, gradually to love, at the heart of
every film of this director.
There is a kind of understated respect for
each other in Kaurismäki’s films that his suffering characters award to one
another that provides his films with their dignity and uplifting view of human
life. The Man without a Past, in is
simple representation of what it truly means to be dependent on “the kindness
of strangers,” is so powerful that it frees us to find joy and laughter in M
and Irma’s lives (she survives the demanding sacrifices of her daily job only
by listening each evening to a heavy dose of rock’n roll), which is up-ended by
a seemingly more destructive discovery of actually who, the now lost and found
again, M actually is, as his wife contacts him after seeing his picture in a
newspaper.
Fortunately, the wife has now found a
new lover, and can only remind our forgetful hero that he lost all of his
long-playing records on gambling debts. Her current lover is ready to defend
his territory, but the always gentle giant, who incidentally has taken in the
supposedly mean watchdog as a pet, is happy to give his old life up. After all,
he now has his “doll” (as in the Broadway musical Guys and Dolls), the Salvation Army worker who, we know, will happily
redeem herself and her new lover’s life.
In Kaurismäki’s pictures, nothing happens
with great drama. The possibility of escaping the harsh worlds which the
characters face, is so gradually revealed that neither they or we actually see
it coming. It just naturally—an important word in this director’s films—comes
to be through the humanity of all the work’s figures, both good and bad.
What this Finnish director’s films seem
to make clear is that no matter how impossible the world seems to be—with
soldiers chasing after you, machines and automobiles working against you, love constantly
alluding you, the money you once had having completely disappeared—life is
still redeemable; the human spirit is always capable of making something
amazing come to be. It’s a comic possibility that we all pray for, dream of,
imagine for ourselves. Perhaps Tennessee Williams’ Blanche DuBois, in her
desperate need to be love, was on to something: sometimes, even in the brutal
context of a devastatingly bad life, you can, in fact, depend upon the kindness
of strangers. Certainly, I have, as has every single character in Kaurismäki’s caring
oeuvre.
Los Angeles,
October 6, 2018
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