Laitakaupungin valot

When you find a formula that works, you often stick to it even to the point of spinning your wheels until you become something of either an establishment or a cliché. Director Aki Kaurismaki may do well to bare this in mind before embarking on his next languid look at sad-faced Finns moving in somnambulistic circles through the streets of Helsinki.

Perhaps considering JUHA and MAN WITHOUT A PAST too fast-paced, Kaurismaki slows down the action in LIGHTS IN THE DARK to a snail's pace.

Despite making me wonder if Kaurismaki is playing it safe by recycling the same ideas, his films are often like comfort food and it would take a lot to make me sick of macaroni and cheese. Rather than keeping on the safe ground, Kaurismaki could follow in the footsteps of his friend and fellow minimalist auteur Jim Jarmusch and make Finnish equivalents of GHOST DOG or DEAD MAN. On second thought, keep with what you're doing, Aki.

This film is an excellent comment on the downward spiral of an individual resulting from a very unequal society with a faulty / oblivious criminal justice system that punishes the innocent, band-aids the symptoms of social ills, but does not address root causes, and the long term social effects of imprisonment. The little guy's life is ruined while the real criminals get away with anything - just like in the real world! Hard work gets you nowhere! Neither does loyalty! It presents in a wonderfully bittersweet way the existential angst of a life at the bottom, just scraping by, against the coldness and apathy of a kind of extreme-Darwinian world where life is brutish and short. Ultimately, a tiny crack of light opens at the end, through humans simply caring for each other. But, like in the real world, you might die before anything good happens. A very stylized film, filmed almost like a comic book, impeccably detailed, spare, and melancholy but beautiful.

I saw this film at the Toronto International Film Festival. This is the third film in Kaurismäki's "Helsinki Trilogy" (the others are Drifting Clouds (1996) and The Man Without a Past (2002)) While I haven't seen the first, this film shares many thematic and formal elements with the second film, and I enjoyed it just as much.

Koistinen is a lonely security guard who is ignored by his co-workers; that is, when he's not being teased by them. His life is soon turned upside down by a femme fatale, with heartbreaking results. Despite the grim-sounding plot, the film is full of the director's trademark deadpan humour. And I'm in awe of how he can make the film just radiate love despite the mannered acting and awkward staging. Perhaps it has to do with the warmth of the lighting and the colour palette, as well as the use of nostalgic music and art direction. Whatever it is, from the first frame, you know the director loves this sad sack and wants us to love him too.

The films of the Helsinki Trilogy all deal with people on the margins, and it's clear that Kaurismäki's sympathies lie with the common people and not with those whose success or power has dehumanized them. He is a true humanist, and his "heroes" all bear their sufferings stoically; in fact, they quite literally personify a "never-say-die" attitude, and that makes them admirable. Their hangdog expressions may make us pity them, but it's their core of inner strength that makes us love them.

Aki Kaurismaki has an instinctive knack of laying down a story. He also presents the interest of being on the margins of life in a marginal country. Think of "Hamlet Goes Business". But in "Lights in the Dusk", Kaurismaki goes Kafka. He leans toward the fable, a genre hard to make into a decent movie. This one follows an honest loser to disaster. The character only manages to crawl out of the pit at the last minute by finally accepting partnership with another, more cautious loser. Visually splendid the film shows us Helsinki in all its modern, hard-edged, hostility, and together with the acting has a flawless unity of style. A.K.'s quirky humor is much less in evidence than usual though you might call a joke the fact that the loser's life in jail is roughly like his existence before he goes inside and after he comes out. Indeed the only time we see him socially at ease and smiling is in the prison yard when spring comes to Helsinki.

Compared to normal Hollywood movies I still enjoy Kaurismäki's films, but this is definitely not one of his best ones.

One of the biggest problems of this film is the director's attitude towards his main character. Koistinen's situation is getting worse with every action he takes. That's not the problem, but Kaurismäki doesn't offer a minimum of possible explanations to Koistinen's behaviour.

I don't expect a complete interpretation of his work by a director or by an author, but as a viewer of a film or as a reader of a book you need at least some information to start at. So I can only imagine that the reasons for Koistinen's behaviour lie in his state of mind and/or in his past.

But this is criticism at a high level. There are still some typical Kaurismäki-scenes in this film which I like a lot.