Kati Outinen, Markku Peltola, Esko Nikkari, Sakari Kuosmanen, Annikki Tähti

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Dvd available: this site (shipped from uk)

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(finnish) official dvd.

region 2 (europe).

2003.

format: pal.
studio: sandrew metronome.
spoken language: finnish.
subtitles: english, swedish.

movie originally released in 2003.

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amazon.co.uk dvd | movie review
evening standard review

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by: neil norman

Film noir's happy Finn

The last time I interviewed Finland's greatest film-maker, Aki Kaurismaki, I had to be carried out of the Soho Brasserie and put in a taxi. This time I am a little more circumspect in my alcoholic intake. The truth is, I just can't compete.

While drinking features in his latest movie, The Man Without A Past, it is not excessive. There is plenty of smoking, however. The film is set among a community of Helsinki's homeless who live in abandoned containers in the docks, and they do not have much money to spend on alcohol.

"In my village, 90 per cent of the people are unemployed." Kaurismaki says. "They get fed by the government. But if you eat, you don't smoke; if you smoke, you don't drink. And if you drink, you don't eat. Once you've spent three years out of work, you're out of the system. You become a B citizen. People were actually living in those containers. They moved back into our sets during the night. Officially there are 5,000 homeless in Helsinki. It's closer to 10,000."

Kaurismaki may sound like a dour fatalist but in reality his films have been getting lighter and sunnier. There is always, for example, a part written for one of his dogs at the insistence of his wife, and at last year's Cannes his dog Tahti won the Evening Standard Palm Dog Award.

"The more hopeless I become about the situation of the world, the more optimistic my films become," he says. "At least let's die laughing."

Kaurismaki's idiosyncratic movies - including those he makes with the rock 'n' roll group Leningrad Cowboys - are invariably veiled comentaries on Finnish society played through the gauze of noir comedy.

His version of Hamlet, Hamlet Goes Business , transplanted the Prince of Denmark into the modern-day chairman of a rubber-duck factory; his one British movie, I Hired a Contract Killer, starred Jean-Pierre Leaud as a failed suicide who hires a hit man to kill him, then tries to cancel the contract when he falls in love. Kaurismaki's view of the human condition may be bleak, but it makes for fascinating cinema.

Like Francois Truffaut and Jean Luc Godard, Kaurismaki has also served his time as a film critic. "I was a lousy critic," he confesses, "because I only had two opinions: 'masterpiece' or 'shit'. I invented the term 'a masterpiece of shit'. But that only applies to my films."