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Review by Simone Bazelli |
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ACCLAIMED Finnish absurdist director - and well-known pisshead - Aki Kaurismaki
ain't treading unfamiliar ground here: The do-it-yourself dockyard homes of
Helsinki's seriously underprivileged, barely surviving through poverty and
lack of opportunity, share the same demographic of his earlier Drifting Clouds
(1996).
No worry, though. This is just as funny, if not more, than even his most celebrated
Leningrad Cowboys Go America (1989).
We follow a mystery man, freshly deposited in Finland's capital (we have no
idea why or how), who gets beating so savage (we see his collarbone cave in
with the thud of a baseball bat), he dies in hospital. That is, until he wakes
up suddenly from a coma, covered in bandages, a la The Invisible Man, and
dumbstruck with acute amnesia.
Unable to remember his identity or his past, he must squeeze out an existence
with no job or home. Taken in by a family on the breadline, he begins a resurrection
with Kati Outinen's sad and lonely Salvation Army volunteer.
But the noirish elements - just look at the central character's name, "M",
and the title of the film itself - leave you in no doubt that something dodgy
from his previous life is on its way to trip him up any moment now...
The actors move as though struck with severe stage fright: wooden, deadpan
and without any remote glimmer of expression. But it's just this calculated,
genuine oddity that generates much of the film's laughs; M's blank and impassive
response to each and every stumbling block is rich in tragedy and comedy in
equal measure: Why converse when a simple drag on a roll-up says it all…?
Kaurismaki always likes to cast his dogs in his films. Here we have Tahti
(Star, to us non-Fins) in a few scene-stealing moments: Like when he looks
passively into thin air when ordered by his bullying, shipyard security guard
master to bite someone's head off. (In fact, the film won the "Palm Dog"
award at the Cannes Film Festival for the best animal role.)
This Friday, The Man Without a Past goes up against the film that narrowly
beat it to the Palme d'Or at Cannes 2002 - The
Pianist.
The director - despite giving birth to the festival's critical favourite -
settled for the second place Grand Prix... No mean feat, really. In fact his
film was the only one to receive two prizes, also taking the best actress
award for Outinen.
