Save your money, don't go to the show
I don't remember under what circumstances I came across Kaurismaki's work.
The first film I saw was La Vie de bohème, in 2010 approximately, I didn't know it was his, at that time I only saw films for the title or for their content, not for their authorship. After some time I changed but Kaurismaki did not, I met him again in Le Havre, at the beginning of 2019 and from there I started this inquiry about his work.
As I start writing this note it sounds on spotify Don't eat the yellow snow by Frank Zappa, and a part of the song says "save your money don't go to the show", which made me think about the work of the Finnish author. This "classic" man who like every author suggests not going to the show, suggests being conscious with consumption, suggests human values that transcend times and cultures, and therein lies his classiness.
Companionship or camaraderie is one of the pillars of the relationships of the characters in almost all his films, the relationship of these characters are accompanied by values of unspoken trust, of chance encounters that mark the characters of inhabitants of a given society, both the more "crude" encounter in his native Finland and the encounter a little more covert in his representation of France. The way in which the encounter of the characters and their goals bifurcate marks one of the most indecipherable features of Kaurismaki's "magic," with a tinge of surrealism but at the same time so human in the common, ordinary sense of the word.
I could say that in Kaurismaki's films, I am always there, I am in a continuous present; a child has to face being a foreigner at a very young age, and he is not in another time that is not the present, he does not look for help in a possible future or in a memory of a nostalgic past; a man works as a security guard in a mega mall, every day passes in his own timeless space, events happen and he remains timeless, this is the way he anchors to the present by fictitious means. When you are alive you are, and when you are dead you are no more, this simple yet complex sentence is the one that runs throughout the films.
Who needs a God?
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Can the same filmmaker commemorate the end of the human race and at the same time shine humanist actions?
A man who does not look back and who says: Memory is more indulgent than truth, I think he could have this double reading in his artistic actions. Thus, with his poetics of solidarity he embraces a time, his own time that is real and true for him and for all the spectators who share his pieces of no more than 70 minutes.
His films look at us, accompany us and anticipate political problems of our present. They make us see consumerism and they don't make us see consumerism.
How is that possible?
In his films we do not see human relationships mediated by technologies, we find decorations of other times that are installed in our own and are anchored by his characters. It is there where our present is, in this absence we find the scourge of consumerism, the evils of a consumer society. Where he tells us "Greed is a mortal sin", but not to feel guilty and hope for a space in heaven, but to see this greed, really see it in flesh and blood.
We exist because we have to consume. His characters do not consume, and how well they exist.
In a world where hope is raised in the future, as a value to be achieved, a product to aspire to. This filmmaker shows us a hope far from the most spectacularization possible that entertainment was able to generate. Hope is there, it is not a product, it is a human being's own engine, far from any religious attitude.
Blind idealism, ignorant of the world, only serves to flatter the good conscience of those who profess it. A limited realism has failed to see the difference between torture and interrogation, between war and justice. One cannot go very far with this opposition of realists who get their hands dirty and noble spirits who defend morality. It reminds me of the debates between economic experts and generous souls: some say how things are, others how they should be. A dialogue of the deaf. We have to start with the world as it is in order to make the world as we want it to be.
Human existence, as we have seen, is an imperfect garden.
Moral excesses are harmful. But a life without any idea of justice and hope is no longer a human life.
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Kaurismaki's work continues to arouse sensations even if you know it by heart, there is no exact place for the work of this director, he was able to find his place and it is not easy to put it next to another, but it is pleasant to connect from time to time, with one of his films. He has something to tell and he found his way how to do it. He generates a grateful smile every time you stop by for a visit.
A romantic man who suggests noble and political gestures, from a place where less and less do.