If you have a heart, there is a moment in Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki's Kauas pilvet karkaavat (Drifting Clouds) which should squeeze a tear from your eyes. But if they stay dry, what can I say, you have definitely been in the industry too long.
On the book shelf in Ilona's apartment - bought on installments and still waiting for the books - there is a photo of a boy. Ilona goes over to the bookcase, lingers, and her face breaks into a sad smile as she contemplates the image. The boy is none other than the late Matti Pellonpää, Kaurismäki's actor friend, whom Kauas pilvet karkaavat was originally written for. Awarded a Felix for his role in Kaurismäki's La vie de Bohème (1992), Pellonpää tragically died last year at the tender age of 43.
Dedicated to his memory, Kauas pilvet karkaavat was rewritten, and his part as a mâitre d'hotel changed into a head waitress, to be played by another Kaurismäki regular, Kati Outinen.
Outinen is Ilona, who loses her job when the owner of Helsinki's Dubrovnik Restaurant is forced to sell the establishment. Soon afterwards, she discovers that her husband Lauri (Kari Väänänen), a tram driver, has also been made redundant a month ago. "But why didn't you tell me?" she asks. "Bad news can wait," he replies with Finnish phlegm.
Ilona meets the former doorman of the Dubrovnik (Sakari Kuosmanen), and they come to the realisation that with unemployment in Finland standing at almost 20%, the labour market is not exactly starving for people with their particular talents. Their only chance is to start up a business on their own, but there is just one problem - capital.
"The unemployment situation in Finland - and almost everywhere in the world and most of all its mental effects - is so desperate that for the moment a film can have no other purpose than to give hope on the one hand, and to document on the other," declares Kaurismäki, who, notwithstanding the subject matter, was determined the film should have a happy ending. "It has always been my secret ambition to make films which result in audiences leaving the cinema a bit happier than they were when coming in," he admits. "With this topic, it was absolutely necessary… It would have been embarrassing if the unemployed man had killed himself in the end, or if the woman had ended up in the propellers of a ferry en route to Sweden."
"I have no respect," he continues, "for films where people are slaughtered by guns for the sake of entertainment. Once you start shooting people and blowing things up, nothing is enough. In a small scale film even a cough can be dramatic. If the main character falls into a gutter, audiences worry more about him than about others who fall out of aeroplanes without getting hurt."
"I am sentimental enough to make the people working together at the end of the film, the same as those who got fired in the beginning. We are talking about something as old-fashioned as solidarity, a concept we tend to shun these days… it no longer exists. That is the clue. To some degree, Kauas pilvet karkaavat is also a marriage drama, something I did not really notice until I started editing the film."
A journalist, critic and scriptwriter, Kaurismäki made his first feature in 1983, Rikos ja rangaistus (Crime and Punishment), based on Dostoyevsky's novel of the same name. His 12 features as a director include the 'working class trilogy' completed between 1986 and 1990, comprising of Varjoja paratiisissa (Shadows in Paradise), Ariel and Tulitikkutehtaan tyttö (The Match Factory Girl).
While Kaurismäki has never had a substantial local following - his films have rarely taken more than 50,000 admissions domestically - he has become an important auteur and name in international art-house circles. Both Tulitikkutehtaan tyttö and his first feature with the Finnish rock group, the Leningrad Cowboys, Leningrad Cowboys Go America, exceeded 700,000 admissions in Germany, and he is, by far, the most well-known Scandinavian director in Japan.
After shooting I Hired a Contract Killer (1990) in London and La vie de Bohème (1992) in Paris, Kaurismäki returned to producing in Finland, where he made three films between 1992-1993, before taking a sabbatical. Kauas pilvet karkaavat marks both his return to cinema and to the recurring issues and themes that have characterised his films to date, but this time, his latest feature is imbued with a certain optimism. "It was surprisingly difficult to come up with a topic," says Kaurismäki. "I thought about it for a long time, knowing all along it is a real shame that films in no way tackle the current disaster in Finland. But the recession cannot be depicted through a diary of unemployment, presenting the employer as evil… the enemy is invisible. I had to come up with something that was universally applicable," Kaurismäki concludes.
Jørn Rossing Jensen
Prod Co: Sputnik
Prod/Dir/Scr/Ed: Aki Kaurismäki
Ph: Timo Salminen
Prod Des: Markku Pätilä, Jukka Salmi
Cast: Kati Outinen, Kari Väänänen, Elisa Salo, Sakari Kuosmanen, Markku Peltola, Matti Omnismaa
Running time: 96mins
Int Sales: World Sales Christa Saredi
