La vie de bohème

I wondered why I was actually laughing at a French film until I realized it was made by Finns. Reminded me a lot of Buster Keaton, except that the pratfalls are mostly cerebral. Deadpan comedy with style. The black dog was the Finnish Rin-Tin-Tin. I hope he got a nice bone for his efforts.

A French playwright, an Albanian painter, and an Irish composer, all living hand-to-mouth in Paris, devise various schemes to secure their next meal, or cheat the landlord, or help each other out of jams. Cynically witty and poignant by turns, La Vie de Boheme somehow manages to simultaneously embellish and skewer the old cliche about starving artists on the Left Bank.

This might almost be the film to show your son or daughter when they have declared that they want to become a novelist or painter and move to an exotic locale--except that, who knows, it might have the opposite of the intended effect.

I liked it quite a bit. Watch for the performance by the Irishman of his own piano piece for his friends, toward the end: hilarious!

Aki Kaurismaki is one of the most important modern directors. He manages to make a movie out of nothing just like, say, Mike Leigh. And his characters are simply every-day people, whom he manages to transform into convincible movie heroes or, most likely, antiheroes.

This movie is not different: it is very sad and also joyous at the same time. It treats a very serious subjects (pourness, loneliness, desperation) without being pathetic or overblown and it makes, in the most beautiful way, a strong connection between the characters and the viewer.

Marvellous acting and genious direction makes this movie another Kaurismaki's little/big masterpiece.

This is a hypothermic look at three dropout artists (a writer, a painter, a musician) who live in an undefined time and place (from the look and feel of it, maybe the suburbs of Paris in the 1950ies). The painter (an Albanian) is actually quite good, the writer distinguishes himself by using an overly florid language ("We'll be right back, like arrows thrown by hand."), the musician doesn't know how to play an instrument. They unerringly define themselves as unrecognised (as opposed to untalented) artists, they never have any money, and they give their devoted women a hard time. Kaurismäki portrays them in his unique style which uses pristinely arranged images in conjunction with absurd humour.

Some people may not get the point. I loved it. I first saw it when it came out in 1992, which was before the internet. I have since managed to google that the movie is based on the same book as Puccini's opera "La bohème". Kaurismäki adopted the book the other way around than Puccini, whereas the opera is colourful and melodramtic, the movie is dour, black-and-white, and minimalistic -- but also funnier.

Although Aki Kaurismaki credits Henri Murger's collection of stories as the source for his "La vie de boheme" (1992), the underlying dramatic structure actually comes straight from Puccini's opera "La boheme" (with the central focus of the story of Rodolphe and Mimi). Superb black and white photography, with a droll script delivered by mostly dead-pan (but nonetheless funny) performers -- including beloved regulars like the late Matti Pellonpaa and Kari Vaananen (Kati Outinen, a very appropriate Mimi I would think, was missing, however -- maybe her French was not good enough).