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MovieMail's Review
"Since there is no hope left in the world, I tried to make a hopeful film without too much pessimism, because everything is kind of wrong nowadays." -- Aki Kaurismäki
The Man Without a Past, the latest film from Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki, is a feel-good comedy, Kaurismäki style. That means deadpan humor, stoic characters, a working-class milieu, and American-style rock music. Markku Peltola plays a welder who is beaten and robbed after stepping off a train to look for work in Helsinki. Referred to as M, he barely survives and loses all memory of his past. Without any material resources, he slowly picks up the pieces and restarts his life among homeless and eccentric squatters on the outskirts of the city. M has to rely on help from generous local residents and obtain charity from the local Salvation Army. In the process, he meets and falls in love with a dour Salvation Army worker named Irma (Kati Outinen).
Renting his quarters from a droll security guard, M acquires a "monstrous" dog named Hannibal, renovates a jukebox that plays American rock music and blues, then turns a bunch of square Salvation Army musicians into a rock band. In another incident, he is arrested as a suspect in a bank robbery only because he was in the bank at the time and could not verify his identity. He later meets with the newly compassionate bank robber, who asks M to use the money he took from his frozen account to pay back people who worked for him. The Man Without a Past is a gentle fantasy that reminded me a little of Miracle in Milan. Like De Sica, Kaurismäki identifies with the alienated, and dramatizes society's dismissive attitude toward them.
Kaurismaki inhabits a filmmaking universe of his own and his latest film continues his unique and curiously charming vision. A man is brutally beaten and taken to the local hospital where he is declared dead. Then he gets up and walks out to begin a new life, acquiring a dog and a juke box and falling in love with a Salvation Army soup kitchen volunteer. But when he unwittingly gets involved in a bank robbery, and can't give the police any details about himself, his past eventually catches up with him and he must confront his future. Dark Finnish humour from the master of deadpan, stoical comedy.
This is a film set squarely in Kaurismaki’s familiar cinematic world of deadpan stoicism and stonefaced comic melancholy. And rock and roll.
A man arrives in Helsinki, is beaten and admitted to hospital. He recovers (perhaps miraculously) and walks out but has lost his memory. He finds community of a sort and a place to live in a shipping container near the docks. He is fed and clothed by the Salvation Army and falls for a volunteer played by Kaurismaki’s regular actress Kati Outinen with her look of cold charity and unrealised dreams.
This is no simple ‘amnesiac finds love and life’ movie though - Kaurismaki is far too interested in well-worn, lived characters and the scraps of pleasure that round out human existence. In his films the main stuff of life like a memory and a job come anyway. More interesting is the man restoring a dumped jukebox that kicks into life with Blind Lemon Jefferson or inviting the Salvation Army Band round to listen to rock and roll in an attempt to widen their repertoire.
Music in general and rock and roll in particular is an essential constituent of any Kaurismaki movie. Sometimes the music fleshes out a scene, sometimes the words from a tune speak people’s feelings for them, and sometimes the juxtaposition is so wholly off kilter that it is hard to know an appropriate response. ‘Ev’rybody shakin’, dancin in the street now’ accompanies a shot of Outinen in bed looking utterly and impassively bereft and staring at her radio. The film then cuts to pictures of rough sleepers. Kaurismaki has never done our laughing for us and he isn’t going to start now.
The overriding feeling is of a tenderness between people that is sometimes buried so deep it barely surfaces. After the man gets fixed up with a container to live in and has electricity run over from the nearest pylon he asks the man who has wired him up, ‘What do I owe you?’. He replies, ‘If I’m ever face down in the gutter, turn me over’.
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