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THE
MAN WITHOUT A PAST
8/10
Mies Vailla Menneisyytta : Finland 2002 : Aki Kaurismaki : 97 mins
A middle-aged man (Markku Peltola)
arrives at Helsinki by train. Within seconds he is beaten up and left
for dead by three baseball-bat wielding thieves. He is taken to hospital,
where he dies. But within seconds, he leaps off his death-bed and removes
his bandages – a miraculous recovery. But he has no memory, and no idea
who he is. Eventually he winds up among the semi-homeless people of the
riverbank, sleeping in a converted container unit rented out by gruff
security guard Anttila (Sakari Kuosmanen). From time to time the Salvation
Army arrives to dispense songs, soup and charity. The nameless Man befriends
S.A. organiser Irma (Kati Outinen), who employs him in the Army’s second-hand
clothing store. A tentative romance develops…
Pitched somewhere in a very Finnish zone between forties film noir, cartoon,
fairytale and morality play, The Man Without A Past is a weird
kind of whimsical comedy. There’s almost always some kind of music playing
in the background – an accordion, or perhaps ome Finnish version of 50s
pop from the old jukebox the Man uses to furnish his container. Everything
is just so, mildly stylised and heightened: the slightly intense
colours and lighting, the characters’ costumes and deadpan dialogue, and
the delivery of their lines. Kaurismaki directs them as if they’re all
non-professionals (which they’re not) – everyone speaks clearly and just
a little slowly, leaving a pause at the end of each line. They stand in
precise poses, strike particular gestures that veer towards the
robotic.
It should be grating - David Mamet’s disastrous State
and Main shows what can happen when actors are nailed down into
a particular grid of mannered behaviour and speech. And the melodramatic,
crime-heavy plot sounds like something the Coen brothers might take as
yet another chance to show off their cleverness (even the title sounds
like The Man Who Wasn’t
There, though it should strictly speaking be The Man Without
A Name rather than The Man Without A Past.) But Kaurismaki’s
approach is infinitely gentler and more sympathetic - if there’s an American
comparison to be drawn, it’s perhaps with David Lynch, who also relies
on music and interior décor to create an alluring alternate reality for
his oddbod characters.
With the obvious exception of the murderous thugs, Kaurismaki is clearly in
love with everyone on screen. As someone says, “It’s all mercy.” If the
film has a major fault, it could perhaps be accused of presenting a rather
saccharine, picturesque version of urban poverty – but Kaurismaki is more
of a Samuel Beckett than a Ken Loach, and nobody is pretending that The
Man Without A Past has anything but the most tangential connection
with the realities of Helsinki 2002.
One nagging question remains, however: the film’s title. The Man does have
a past – his loss isn’t so much memory as identity, and his lack
of a name plays a recurring and crucial role in the plot, even
landing him in a police cell when he gets inadvertently entangled in a
bank heist. The police take a dim view of his namelessness, but are halted
in their tracks by the sudden arrival of a nondescript gent - a lawyer
(Matti Wouri) hired by the Salvation Army who turns out to possess what
must be the sharpest legal brain in cinema history.
30th November, 2002
(seen 26th November, Tyneside Cinema)
Click
here for the shorter version of this review.
by Neil
Young
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