The Rest from Finland's Finest
Now Playing: The final four films of the Kaurismaki retrospective (briefly)
One of the inevitable elements with a retrospective of a relatively obscure (by Columbus standards anyway) filmmaker is that most of the really top-notch stuff will be front-loaded into the schedule. This was, curious filmgoers can come to see something really awesome and then be compelled to stick around for the rest of the guy's work. Heck, it worked on me. And while none of the films I've seen in the series' last two nights are up to the standards of Kaurismaki's finest work, they're certainly worth checking out for people other than anal-retentive completists like me. Wednesday night's films, ARIEL (1988) and SHADOWS IN PARADISE (1986) are the first two films in a trilogy that was completed with THE MATCH FACTORY GIRL (1990), and both films have a keen eye for the malaise of Finland's working class. ARIEL in particular plays like an earlier, less precious version of THE MAN WITHOUT A PAST. In both films a man travels to another town, is beaten up and loses his means for living, forcing him to scrape out a new way of life. I found that I preferred ARIEL to MAN because Kaurismaki's quirky sense of humor and strange storytelling coincidences felt less forced here. Also, I got an incidental thrill from seeing the late, great Matti Pellonpaa thrown into the mix. SHADOWS IN PARADISE was also highly enjoyable, with Pellonpaa as an introverted garbage collector who tries to romance a surly Kati Outinen. Surely the teaming of Kaurismaki with Outinen is one of the great extended director-performer collaborations, since she so perfectly embodies the prevailing tone of his work while finding original notes to strike in various films (her performance in SHADOWS IN PARADISE is hardly the same as, say, TAKE CARE OF YOUR SCARF, TATJANA or THE MAN WITHOUT A PAST), which is comforting especially since she has dominated Kaurismaki's work ever since Pellonpaa's lamented passing. The Thursday night selections to conclude the series were two of the filmmaker's most anomalous films, 1987's HAMLET GOES BUSINESS and 1990's I HIRED A CONTRACT KILLER. Of the two, Hamlet is the more successful film, largely because Kaurismaki inventively subverts the high drama of Shakespeare's tragedy (he's hardly beholden to his source) to fit his own style. I also liked how the film changes the original ending in the interest of keeping with the director's class concerns (here the servants are much more fleshed-out than in the original). Finally, I HIRED A CONTRACT KILLER was something of a curiosity, being Kaurismaki's only English-language feature. Here the hero is played by the great Jean-Pierre Leaud, who is enough of a rumpled sadsack to fit comfortably into the filmmaker's sensibility; the same could be said for the film's villain, a dying killer played by Kenneth Colley. Where the film goes off course is in the portrayal of Leaud's love interest, played by Margi Clarke- the character's optimism clashes with the rest of the film, and Clarke isn't actress enough to subvert the character with the requisite weary resignation needed to pull it off. I guess Kaurismaki wanted to make a film apart from his usual cast here, but in retrospect it might have been more successful had he made the love interest Finnish and had Outinen speak English. Still, it's certainly worthwhile, and on top of Leaud's performance I enjoyed the way the urban rubble was reminiscent of postwar British dramas. All in all, the Kaurismaki retro was a success, as was the Fassbinder last month. Bring on Von Trier!

Ratings:
Ariel: ***.
Shadows in Paradise: ***.
Hamlet Goes Business: **1/2.
I Hired a Contract Killer: **1/2.