Juha

Juha is the last silent film of the 20th century. And a truly great one, I might add. Adapting a Finnish literary classic (already brought to the screen three times), Scandinavian master Aki Kaurismäki (whose movies have always had limited dialogue, mind) tells a cruel, touching story of love, loss and revenge.

Weirdly for a Kaurismäki movie, Juha seems to open on a happy note: we witness the everyday life of the eponymous farmer (a never better Sakari Kuosmanen) and his wife Marja (the consistently astounding Kati Outinen). The two don't lead the easiest of lives, but somehow they manage to survive and keep an optimistic view on existence.

That's when Shemeikka (André Wilms, whose previous work with the director includes Bohemian Life and Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses) enters the game. He comes from the big city, and is forced to spend the night at Juha's because of a lousy car. The following morning he returns home, only this time he's got company: he has seduced Marja, promising her a better life. Sadly, she'll come to regret her choice as it turns out that Shemeikka actually runs a brothel. All she can do is hope her husband will forgive her and come to the rescue.

The audacious aspect of Juha is not the fact that it's shot in black and white (Kaurismäki does that quite often), but the fact that there's no sound at all. Dialogue is shown through title cards, and the rest of the action is left to the strength of the performances: Kuosmanen shows a staggering intensity as the leading man, Outinen is at her most vulnerable playing his wife, and Wilms is perhaps the best villain the Finnish director has ever come up with. Utterly cold and repulsive, he really makes sure you won't like him.

Juha works thanks to its honesty and raw power: it's not a pastiche of silent movies, but a serious, endearing tragedy, and further proof of Kaurismäki's high rank among Scandinavian film-makers.

A pleasant little trifle - a modern-day Finnish silent film, with few intertitles (but a somewhat tacky music score) about a decent cabbage farmer whose wife is lured away by a seedy underworld type. The film sketches their initial contented lifestyle with deliberate naivete ("Happy as children," says the caption), all the better to set up the ultimate tragedy. Cleanly and simply shot, the film is obviously no great shakes, but it places itself with total conviction within the silent film aesthetic - tipping us off to the villain's nastiness, for example, through an unselfconscious shot of him stepping gleefully on a butterfly; and also finding room for a classic-type shot of a dog running after the bus carrying away his master. The design of just-so-slightly exaggerated faces and postures is sustained quite well, setting up an ending that seems authentically modern and tragic for all its bogeyman-type trappings.

Juhani Aho's 1901 novel JUHA is a classic of Finnish literature, a dismal view of Nordic life over a century ago when life in the country was poor and brutal. Crippled farmer Juha lives with his lovely young wife Marja and the two manage their planted vegetables and livestock. The rich and seductive Shmeikka happens to drop by, and he manages to convince Marja to leave her husband for a better life in the big city. To Marja's horror, Shmeikka proves to be a pimp who imprisons her in a brothel. Meanwhile Juha, feeling humiliated, plans his revenge.

Aho's novel had been adapted for stage and film on a few occasions before, but Aki Kaurismäki's 1999 film offers a fresh take. Kaurismäki chose to shoot it in black-and-white as a silent film, with the minimal dialogue necessary to get the plot being shown as intertitles. But Kaurismäki's film is also, like all of his work, a black comedy. Sure, at the climax he depicts the events as a straightforward drama, but elsewhere the shots are imbued with a subtle humour. By this point in his career, Kaurismäki had established a set of stock elements from which he assembled his films: deadpan faces (Kati Outinen as Marja hardly moves the lower portion of her face, doing everything with her eyes), a mismatch between a modern setting and antique appliances or class struggle, and bands on stage performing some antiquated rock or Finnish tango genre. Shmeikka (French actor Andre Wilms, in the third of his collaborations with the Finnish auteur) is such a stock 19th-century villain that his mere presence in this modern-day setting elicits laughter. And the setting that Kaurismäki has chosen for the ending, which I won't spoil here, is a laugh-out-loud example of his depiction of Helsinki.

Kaurismäki also likes to play up the features of silent films that nowadays seem silly to us: in an early scene in the village tavern, Juha (Sakari Kuosmanen) laughs wildly and slaps his hands on his knees, the kind of overacting typical of the silent era. Just as silent films had musical accompaniment that seems kind of insubstantial and lightweight, here Kaurismäki has commissioned a score that is pure muzak.

The humour may be too subtle to get for viewers who aren't already attuned to this director's sui generis style. A film like "Drifting Clouds" or his so-called Proletariat Trilogy might be a better introduction to Kaurismäki. Also, JUHA feels somewhat slight compared to some of his other films, and black-and-white photography has never been his forte. Still, I enjoyed this film as part of a chronological journey through Kaurismäki's output.

I'm not sure if this film has been released with English subtitles, but it does not matter. The story, the classic love triangle gone bad, is easy to follow in this silent movie. Director Aki Kaurismaki appears to have had fun with his remake of the Finnish novel. During the scenes at the farm house notice the subtle changes in the kitchen appliances, including the microwave oven. Kaurismaki is the director of the Leningrad Cowboys movies. Fans of those two movies should also recognize Sakari Kuosmanen, who plays Juha. Juha's beloved wife Marja is brilliantly played by Kati Outinen. Their visual narrative is both outstanding and insightful. I saw this movie with my wife during its first week in France. Neither of us speak Finnish nor could we read the French subtitles, but again, it didn't matter (thanks jan). With running time just slightly over an hour and fifteen minutes, it was the perfect way to spend a rainy afternoon in Paris.

The first reaction is: a silent movie? in black & white?? In Finnish??? Have no fear. This is a terrific movie, one of the best of the year, perhaps even Kaurismaki's best. Tremendous soundtrack, equally good acting, beautifully written. Juha brings it all together with rare power. Don't dare miss this one.