The final part of Aki Kaurismäki's 'losers' trilogy (following Drifting Clouds and The Man without a Past), Lights in the Dusk sees honest night watchman Koistinen – whose employer at Western Alarms still asks for his name out of spite after three years – ignored by colleagues, seduced by a mobster’s vamp, framed for robbery, and then get beaten half to death on his release from prison. All of which is unlooked-for, undeserved and utterly unjust. It seems perverse then to say that one can leave this film uplifted by a spirit of human endurance and the acts of kindness that can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
Kaurismäki claims Chaplin (especially City Lights) and Bresson as the godfathers of his film, which is entirely fitting; the heartless erasure of a man’s possibilities by an indifferent nemesis – in this case a deeply unpleasant hood named Lindholm – who may also prove to be the unexpected route to spiritual salvation, is familiar from Bresson, but this is balanced by – well, not happy-go-lucky Chaplinesque optimism, certainly not – but rather a stolid bloody-minded acceptance of the situation and tantalising glimpses of future promise.
Partly as a reaction to The Man Without a Past, which he describes as ‘insufferably sickly-sweet’, Kaurismäki said that his original idea for the film was to put his protagonist in an exceptionally bleak modern milieu – in this case the soulless commercial district of Ruoholahti in Helsinki – and then batter and bully him to death (to provide a ‘realistic’ vision of life in present-day Finland). He doesn’t quite go through with this. ‘Luckily for our protagonist, the author of the film has a reputation of being a soft-hearted old man, so we can assume there is a spark of hope illuminating the final scene’ says he in his accompanying notes to the film. And so there is. As he also says, ‘there’s a lot of hope in this film – but only in the last 18 frames.’ It’s not quantity but quality that counts here.
The colour schemes that Kaurismäki has his characters act out their dramas among are part of the film’s great appeal, even to the extent of (despairing) laugh-out-loud moments such as the meal that Koistinen provides for the blonde ‘femme fatale’ (blue stockings that give her legs the colour of death, long, vaguely threatening red blouse collars), which consists of 4 bagels on a plate and knives and forks with flesh-pink plastic handles. (‘The roast is in the oven’ he says.)
Appropriately for a study of loneliness, the canvases of Edward Hopper provide another point of reference for the set designs, as when, after Koistinen has told the hot dog woman he has a date, and she sees a hopeful relationship suddenly extinguished, she turns off the red neon ‘Grilli’ sign above her stall, it gives a little fizzle and leaves her lit up like a point of light in the deep blue night. Like her, we feel we have lost something.
Dialogue is spare – and what need do you have of words when the characters, their faces, gestures and their situations make everything so plain? Janne Hyytiäinen (Koistinen), who played the bartender in Dogs Have no Hell (available on the Ten Minutes Older compilation) has the perfect face for the role. One can imagine him as a child, eager to please, and something of that has survived to adulthood, but life and loneliness have sculpted an façade of slightly aggressive impassiveness on his face, from behind which this urge to connect with others makes tentative, slightly pathetic peeps, only to be met with abuse and rebuff.
Last, but certainly not least, dogs. Lights in the Dusk features a performance from Paju. Her great-grandmother Laika played the role of Baudelaire in La Vie de Boheme, her grandmother, Piitu, was in Juha, and her mother, Tähti, won the Palme D’og prize in Cannes in 2002 for her role in The Man without a Past. Says Kaurismäki,‘I like dogs, mankind I don't care for too much. You're supposed to like mankind because you're part of it, but I prefer dogs. They are honest and they don't lie.’
A marvellously droll tragicomedy of love and crime, in which a security guard meets a femme fatale who sets him up, exploiting his gullibility. The final part of Kaurismäki's 'loser' trilogy, following on from Drifting Clouds and The Man without a Past.
Partly a reaction to Man without a Past, which he said he found 'sickly sweet', Kaurismäki said that his original idea for the film was to put his protagonist in an exceptionally bleak modern milieu and then batter and bully him to death. He doesn’t (quite) go through with this. ‘Luckily for our protagonist, the author of the film has a reputation of being a soft-hearted old man, so we can assume there is a spark of hope illuminating the final scene’ he says. And so there is.
