Week #12: Lights in the Dusk
‘I went to see a movie with my girlfriend. It was good, plenty of action.’
Koistinen, Lights in the Dusk
Over the last few years, we’ve seen Hollywood cleanse the dirty business of creating sequels to successful films by making these works Cinematic Universes. When Rian Johnson announced that Knives Out would result in a second outing for Daniel Craig’s gumbo gumshoe Benôit Blanc, it came as a shock reminder of how things used to be: an original film does surprisingly well, and you see how many films its strongest elements can pass through the gauntlet of the creator and the public’s waning interest. Cinematic Universes are more elastic and allow for more subsidiary repurposing before things lose their flavour.
Whether or not I like Marvel or DC’s Expanded Universes is by the by, because I thoroughly approve of the approach, albeit in its arthouse form. Every time an Éric Rohmer season is announced, I have to squint very hard to remember if I’ve seen this particular morally probing story of women in pastel clothes at a beach house or it’s another I’m thinking of. Of course, one of cinemas grand theories – auteurism – rests upon the principle of a director’s continuity of technique and theme. But I think it’s worth distinguishing between directors like Darren Aronofsky or Steven Soderbergh (to use two working examples) who take different subjects and pour them into a vessel shaped like their own interests (Aronofsky is said to have sat down in the mid-nineties and written down the ten subjects for films he’d like to make, as though the subjects were mere punching bags to spar with). Then there’s directors like Fassbinder, Almódovar, Rohmer, Roy Andersson, Hal Hartley and Finland’s finest son, Aki Kaurismakï, whose films are only as different from each other as family members to each other. Sometimes they as differ as much as cousins, other times more like non-identical twins. There’s usually a work or two that acts as a foundational mother and father (even if it’s just because they were the first you came across). The point is, there’s the same nose, a way around a vowel that lets you know that they’re birds of a feather.
Aki Kaurismakï ranks highly for creating his own world. Besides twenty-one feature films since 1983, he also carved out his own universe further by co-inventing a band and opening a cinema-bar-pool hall complex, Andorra (which in a very Kaurismakï turn of events, recently closed to be turned into a hotel). He works with the same actors most of the time, chief among them his Modigliani-faced female lead Kati Outinen and his male-lead, perturbed walrus Matti Pellonpää (Kaurismakï only switching when he died of a heart attack at 44, having played a bin man scared of dying of a premature heart attack in Shadows in Paradise). While we’re all living through days that feel the same in our quarantines, there’s something appealing about diving deeply into one of these universes. A comforting repetition, buying a boxset of one of these filmmakers is like having a blister pack of medicine close to hand. Take one deadpan Finnish comedy and see me in the morning.
So what is Kaurismakï’s thing? His films are all about people living monotonous lives (wait wait, come back!), and the final meta-joke is that there is a cross-film monotony (please, I beg you to stay). The circumstances never change between films – poverty and isolation – so it’s up to the characters to see if they can make a trip or a personal connections that can turn things around (usually it's just enough to matter). If that sounds like very much like the exact opposite of why you should give anyone 90 minutes or more of your time (let alone multiple times), think of the pleasures of Edward Hopper’s hushed and intense studies of boredom as a point of comparison. Kaurismakï’s trick is taking scenes that have little action or motion, and framing them in such a way that they’re lit from inside; boredom seen as something that is actively happening, rather than an absence of action. It’s a boredom as close and hot as the sun, but it’s as though it’s shining on things for the first time. Seen with that distance and novelty, things become very funny. He’s a minute observer of action, and when things minorly jump the rails (someone has a door awkwardly opened upon them, a flubbed kiss), it raises a smile and a laugh of recognition.
In Lights in the Dusk (2006; a title I couldn’t reliably recall if pressed to, so similar to other of his greats Shadows in Paradise and Drifting Clouds), we are with security guard Koistinen (Janne Hyytiäinen), who does his nightly rounds, scanning at each waypoint to prove he still exists and did his duties. He’s ignored or jeered at by co-workers, occasionally buying a hot dog from a portacabin grill. We never find out why he’s disliked at work. He becomes part of a jewel robbery, hoodwinked by Mirja (Maria Järvenhelmi) into believing she is romantically interested in him, when she only has eyes for his security access codes. Rather than rat her out and her accomplices, he serves a year in prison. He almost gets together with the woman from the grill, but their fate lies beyond the end credits.
At one point Koistinen confronts three louts who have chained a dog up for days. He asks them to step outside for a barney, but the camera stays in the bar, observing the swaying swing door in the wake of their departure, cutting to him once the blood is already dried on his nosebleed. Action sometimes happens but it’s mainly offscreen. Even the gangsters who profit from Koistinen’s fidelity (and naivety) are shown living a flavourless high life. Sitting round playing cards and drinking whiskey, Mirja’s indifferent hoovering acts as a comment on the chore of living in the demimonde.
Sometimes life’s more exciting moments do turn up in his films, and they’re played out in full. Characters go to a bar, and you watch a pub band’s performance from start to finish. You get a sense of how invigorating and surprising rock and roll music would have been when it turned up in Finland, and also how accessible: a guitar, drums, bass and a tonne of hair lacquer was all you need. Similarly, that proved enough to fuel two feature films and a concert film about his made up absurdist rockabilly group The Leningrad Cowboys. Almost all of Kaurismakï’s films run less than 75 minutes, as though he knows each one is a lark that he won’t let run longer than your sense of humour for it.
Kaurismakï’s saving grace as a filmmaker (and why he’s much more fun than the description so far might cast him) is the way he walks around social realism, rather than wallowing in it. All of his characters and scenarios could easily exist in early Ken Loach. But the production design alone means it plays much more like fantasy. Although the spaces he is interested in could have been found, he prefers to create them wholly, building absurdly sparse and bare interiors, turned to give him just the elements he needs for a composition. His colours always veer into heightened sickly greens and institutional icy blues.
(The Match Factory Girl)
To take another example, The Match Factory Girl is about a deeply lonely woman who is cast out by her parents because of a one night dalliance with an indifferent and cruel man. When she becomes pregnant, rather than have the abortion her partner enforces, she is struck by a car. Returning home, she acquires some rat poison and drugs her lover and another random man who propositions her in a bar. In the final scene, she is wordlessly taken away by the police. Kaurismakï refuses to make poverty the defining feature of his characters’ lives, merely one detail about them. True, the greater the poverty, the closer its clouds hover over your life. But Kaurismakï uses neither an outsider’s pity nor sentimentalises these lives. He has a keen feeling for the small pieces of pride we all take, whatever our status: in Lights in the Dusk, we watch Koistinen give his hair and then his shoes a high shine, using a kitchen drawer to prop himself up before heading out to the cinema, bathing in the luxury of the screen and the woman next to him.
With world-building directors, the seams to their approach are more visible when they step outside their mode, or inhabit it as an exercise. Look at a film like Almódovar’s I’m So Excited, which plays like an ersatz Jive Bunny megamix of his greatest hits. As though that film served to exorcise a certain tired mode, he came back with the relatively wiped slate of Julieta. But I don’t expect people to change. I can’t say why, but there are certain people I’d happily let them show me the same card trick once every couple of years until the end of time.
(Special thanks this week to Robin, who bought me an Aki Kaurismakï boxset an aeon ago and I finally finished this week to write this piece. Thanks for the intro to the family, brother.)
Recommendations
Taking a tech Sabbath. Hopefully this doesn’t come across as holier than thou, but something I’ve been doing about once a month for a few years is putting my phone and laptop away for a weekend day until sundown. Resets your habits and lets you focus on other things, something we could all do with a bit of right now.
Evil Dead II (streaming inexpensively) shares with Kaurismakï the use of silent film techniques to modern uses (though in Sam Raimi’s case its a metric tonne of slapstick). Pound for pound, packs in as much fun and visual detail as an Aardman film (and makes excellent use of stop motion too).
This recipe from my man Nigel Slater is pretty quarantine easy and just wholesome enough (although you might need to use some of those frozen cubes of spinach).