Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 10/06/17

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Friday, October 6, 2017

Shadows in Paradise (Aki Kaurismäki, 1986)

Kati Outinen and Matti Pellonpää in Shadows in Paradise

Nikander: Matti Pellonpää
Ilona Rajmäki: Kati Outinen
Melartin: Sakari Kousmanen
Co-worker: Esko Nikkari
Ilona's Girlfriend: Kylli Köngäs
Shop Steward: Pekka Laiho

Director: Aki Kaurismäki
Screenplay: Aki Kaurismäki
Cinematography: Timo Salminen

Glumly smoking their lungs out, a garbage collector and a supermarket clerk embark on a ploddingly passionless relationship -- their first date, to her disgust, is at a bingo parlor -- in Aki Kaurismäki's Shadows in Paradise. Don't look too hard for paradise: It's no more in evidence in Kaurismäki's film than in his friend Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise (1984), unless Talinn, the Estonian capital toward which the couple set sail on a Soviet liner at the end of the film, is their idea of heaven. It's hard to think of a film as both authentic and ironic, but Kaurismäki and his actors manage to make their characters both convincing and, in a very low-key way, funny. It took me a while, to be sure, to catch on to the tone of the film: I had never seen one of Kaurismäki's before, and coming cold to its gray Helsinki cityscape and its entirely unprepossessing leads -- Outinen and Pellonpää are by far the homeliest performers in the film -- I wasn't sure whether the twinges of mirth I felt at their solemn, dogged worldview was appropriate. For that matter, I'm still not sure --- which is one of the reasons I find the film so interesting.