Pay a visit to Kaurismäki’s unique cinematic universe, where melodrama meets minimalism and bitter reality is tempered with deadpan comedy.
Kaurismäki depicts the intersecting (mis)fortunes of a refugee from Gabon and a shoeshine man in the French port of the title. “A love letter to France, in particular to a half-imaginary, half-vanished realm of proletarian Frenchness” (New York Times).
A Syrian refugee adrift in Helsinki finds an unlikely ally in a sullen restaurateur in Kaurismäki’s delightfully humanizing take on immigration. “At once honest and artful, a touching and clear-sighted declaration of faith in people and in movies” (New York Times).
An amnesiac finds comfort with a dour Salvation Army soup-slinger in Kaurismäki’s “comedy of losers,” a look into the heart of poverty and the warmth of humanity. “At once artful, accessible . . . hilarious and humane” (New York Times).
Forget Puccini: Kaurismäki delivers his own ironic yet improbably sincere take on Henri Murger’s novel of bohemians struggling to sustain themselves, their loves, and their art in a timelessly shabby Paris.
This grimly funny gender parable stars Kaurismäki regular Kati Outinen in “a beautiful, unsentimental performance . . . deeply realized and affecting” (New York Times). With short Those Were the Days.
For three decades Aki Kaurismäki has been creating a unique cinematic universe of bitter reality tempered with a guarded optimism, where, even as society and its institutions continue to fail the most vulnerable, sometimes it is possible for kindness and spontaneous solidarity to make a difference. The profoundly cinephilic Finn’s films combine the restraint of Robert Bresson with the melodrama of Douglas Sirk, references to Italian neorealism and French film noir (such as the films of Jacques Becker also screening this summer) with the deadpan comedy of Buster Keaton. Regardless of location, whether in Helsinki, London, or Le Havre, Kaurismäki’s films are set in a present infused with anachronistic elements and retro-cinematic details. Cinematographer Timo Salminen masterfully captures the director’s troupe of actors and the meticulous mise-en-scène they inhabit.
Thanks to Brian Belovarac, Janus Films; Michael Dicerto, Sony Pictures Classics; Jenni Domingo, Finnish Film Foundation; and Steve Gravestock and Jason Cheong, TIFF Film Reference Library.