Artificial Eye has released a box set of seventeen movies and a collection of short films by Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki. Ranging from an update of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment from 1983 to his latest movie, this year’s The Other Side of Hope, this is the most complete collection of his movies yet.
Kaurismäki has a distinctive and cine-literate style, and the films are threaded with cinematic references not least to Kaurismäki’s primary inspiration French director Robert Bresson. Kaurismäki‘s approach to filmmaking is essentially an extended homage to his cinematic hero and he shares Bresson’s preoccupation with detail and physical movement. Also like Bresson, Kaurismäki’s narrative and visual style is economical and basic, unadorned by melodrama. His films tend to have a bone-dry thread of comedy, an ironic, cynical view of the world that somehow manages to be simultaneously alienating and intimately familiar. Despite his emulation of Bresson, Kaurismäki is undeniably an original and brave director; his films are not easily digested but are always rewarding.
The highlights of this collection are a trilogy of movies from the late 1980s and early 1990s that include the classics Ariel and The Match Factory Girl, films focussing with uncomfortable intimacy on working class lives in Helsinki that are part-Mike Leigh, part-Coen brothers with a strange mixture of social realism and blackly ironic comedy. Recently, Kaurismäki has had a renaissance, specifically with the award winning Le Harve from 2011 and the highly regarded The Other Side of Hope. These films move away from the local issues of the director’s earlier films and instead access the preoccupations of the 2000s, most notably immigration, although in the brilliant Le Harve, this is imbedded in a beautifully parochial story about a poor elderly couple in a French coastal town.
These films aren’t for everyone. They aren’t a laugh-a-minute but instead have a deeply black, and frequently unsettling, line of humour. Unlike the movies of Jim Jarmusch, perhaps the closest relative to Kaurismäki, the films lack whimsy and charm, instead substituting social realism and a strong punch of moral humanism. They’re best watched with some preparation, both cinematic (I’d suggest Bresson’s 1967 Mouchette) and psychological. You need to be prepared for pain before you can see the comedy underneath.
The collection is a mixture of Blu-ray and DVD and the films, whilst not remastered are solid transfers. Kaurismäki’s films are decidedly lo-fi anyway, so a clean and sharp image isn’t vital. This collection does lack special features, however, although the comprehensive range of movies makes up for this.
If you’re already a fan of the Finnish director or of his brand of darkly ironic realism then this is a must. If not, then you might need to do some homework.
THE AKI KAURISMAKI COLLECTION / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: AKI KAURISMAKI / SCREENPLAY: VARIOUS / STARRING: VARIOUS / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
