The Higher Depths: The Criterion Collection Blu-ray Release of Aki Kaurismaki's La Vie de Boheme

When the Finnish writer-director Aki Kaurismaki first appeared on the world film scene in the late 1980s, he risked being typecast as a sort of Nordic-European doppelgänger to Jim Jarmusch, who shared Kaurismaki’s dry wit, his fixation on slightly outdated lowlife-bohemian milieus, and devotion to visual and narrative spareness. Like Jarmusch, Kaurismaki has sometimes rushed into production with only one joke in mind – as in his rock-band road movie Leningrad Cowboys Go America, which boasted a cameo by Jarmusch himself – and one audience member in mind, himself. La Vie de Boheme, which has just been released on DVD and Blu-ray by the Criterion Collection, was Kaurismaki’s most full-bodied and accessibly funny picture to date when it was first released in 1992. (He’s since topped himself, with The Man Without A Past, his 2002 comedy about an amnesiac who reinvents himself as a promotor of “rhythm music,” i.e., jumpy, stripped-down rock and roll.) In some ways, this, too, is a one-joke movie, but the director loves the joke, and the people who embody it, so much that it takes on the quality of a world view.

Le Havre: A Funny Film that Celebrates Harboring the Helpless

Blondin Miguel as Idrissa in Le Havre

Don’t expect to see Scandinavian musicians with extremely pointy shoes and hairstyles. The wacky characters in Aki Kaurismaki’s Leningrad Cowboys Go America (1989) do not appear in Le Havre, an equally deadpan new film by the Finnish writer-director that has much more of a beating heart. He sets this one in the French port city, where an occasional cell phone is the rare hint of modernity in an otherwise thoroughly convincing early 1950s ambiance. This version of the seaside Normandy town is populated by a quaint citizenry whose clothing, homes, shops and cars are very mid-20th century. In a working-class neighborhood, their normally sedate existence becomes less so due to an issue that has exploded in the 21st-century: undocumented immigrants. These days in America, they’re often dismissively referred to merely as “illegals.”

With In This World (2002), Michael Winterbottom was among the first filmmakers in recent decades to address the plight of refugees in a compassionate way. That docudrama concerned young men from Afghanistan making their way across an often hostile Europe in hopes of a better future than is possible back home. Le Havre centers on an adolescent boy named Idrissa (Blondin Miguel) from Gabon who escapes when police discover a huddled mass of Africans in a shipping container on the docks. He’s later spotted hidden in the shallow water behind wooden pilings by Marcel (Andre Wilms), a local man with a marginal career shining shoes in an era of Nikes – along with cell phones, another 2011 touch. Ditto for sensationalist newspaper headlines that suggest the fugitive lad being hunted by cops could be linked to al-Qaeda.

Imaging Irony: Without Empathy / 8 Filmmakers

(Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press.)

“Censorship is the mother of all metaphor.”

Jorge Luis Borges

It’s always heartening to encounter other lovers of cinematic art who resonate with one’s own passions for moving pictures that speak in a kind of secret language that we alone can fully understand. Even if that we is a large multitude of sorts, the pleasures we share in the brilliant darkness of movie theatres still seem to situate us in a private world unfolding before our mesmerized eyes. Between the flickering screen and our witnessing selves there is a shared bond which speaks to us in a dialect constructed from images that often tell a story somewhat different from the linear narrative of the screenplay script.

The Filmmaker Next Door: Jonathan Demme (1944-2017)

Filmmaker Jonathan Demme passed away last Wednesday, April 26, at the age of 73.

For a solid stretch of ten, maybe twelve years, Jonathan Demme had the distinction of being both the hippest and kindest film director in America. To appreciate the enormity of this accomplishment, it helps to concede that it’s somewhat paradoxical. There are no hard and fast rules for rating moviemakers according to their hipness, but the ones to whom the label sticks are likely to have an air of cultish exclusivity to them; interesting music choices help, but so does a challenging, threatening edge, a sense that, say, Jim Jarmusch or Alex Cox or Aki Kaurismaki is not from these parts, and may be talking over the heads of, or having a laugh at the expense of, those who do not get their work. Compared to them, Demme always had an open, smiling, corn-fed quality.

So did David Lynch, arguably the greatest and most original American director to cement his reputation in the 1980s, but after Blue Velvet hit, Lynch began to cultivate his own paradoxical public image as Captain Strange from Middle America. No doubt Lynch’s personality is his own – “authentically” his own, as the kids would say – but a man who unveils a movie as drenched in perverse sexuality and nihilistic violence as Wild at Heart at the Cannes Film Festival while releasing a press bio consisting of the four words “Eagle Scout Missoula Montana” is a man who knows that press attention helps to keep his career going and who has learned how to use what seems weird about him as a conversation starter. Demme never stopped seeming like the genuinely nice boy next door. He was just the boy next door who had more wide-ranging interests and better taste in music and movies than anyone you’d ever met.