Unknown Great Films nr.37

The famously melancholy Finn Aki Kaurismäki made in 1996 a splendidly dour film called (in English) Drifting Clouds. (The title is a mis-translation: the clouds are not aimlessly drifting, but clearing.) It was so relentlessly non-happy that no American distributor would touch it. Just imagine: a pair of nice people to whom bad things happen, without a justice-is-served happy ending! Who would want to see that? I did, and perhaps you should too—if just for the novel experience of seeing a film that trusts you to have your own emotions.

The film traces a year in the life of a couple for whom everything goes wrong. Ilona (the wonderful Kati Outinen) is headwaitress in a declining once-noble restaurant; Lauri (Kari Väänänen) is a tram driver. They are poor, just scraping by. Their apartment has a few sticks of furniture, for instance a bookcase without books (they can't afford any) on which stands a framed photo of a young boy. He is never mentioned; we see him at the beginning of the film for a few seconds above and between their heads, in the manner of Renaissance putti, as they discuss the state of their lives. These are not particularly good, and they are about to get an awful lot worse.

Put it this way: the only bad thing that might happen to them that doesn't, is that their dog doesn't run away. Nobody ever smiles, not once; there is nothing to smile about. It rains every day, with one exception. On that single sunny day, Ilona buys a bouquet of flowers and goes to the cemetery to lay them on the grave of their son: the boy in the photo. That would be the dramatic centrepoint of some films; here it's a wordless five-second scene, just another sadness. That it can be so, strikes home how desperately sad their lives have become, in a way that five minutes of filmed tears would not.

The film goes on like a nightmare rollercoaster, getting steeper and blacker, steadily less and less funny, right up to the end when Ilona meets her old boss, who offers to stake them in a new restaurant. It opens, a few people arrive. Perhaps their luck might possibly be about to get a tiny bit better.

The end.

Most of my friends who saw it, came out with tearstained faces and needing a stiff drink or a razor blade. They saw a sad and pessimistic film: how life remorselessly crushes two innocent people. I saw the film with Sascha, and we came out—also with tearstained faces, but laughing for joy. We saw a sad but optimistic film: things might work out, there is hope for them. I think that we were right and the others were wrong: Despite the blackness and sadness of their (our) lives, there remains a chance of happiness.

The second Unknown Great Film has been posted: it's nr. 41