Man Without a Past

posted to www.marxmail.org on April 28, 2003

For those who are not familiar with the work of Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki , I strongly urge you to seek out "Man Without a Past" (Mies Vailla Menneisyyttä), which is playing in NYC right now and very likely in other cities as well.

Not only is this the greatest film made by one of the world's greatest film makers, it is probably the most accessible. It revolves around the ordeals of a welder who is assaulted and left for dead by a trio of skinheads in a Helsinki park. After a brief stay in a hospital, he staggers into a colony of homeless people living in discarded containers recycled from a nearby wharf. He accepts their hospitality and eventually settles in himself. Unfortunately, he cannot tell them or prospective employers his name since the beating has left him with total amnesia.

For those not familiar with Kaurismäki's work, it might be a shock to learn that "Man Without a Past" is a comedy.

But a comedy it is. The amnesiac is played by Markku Peltola, a tall, middle-aged, weather-beaten actor of the kind that Kaurismäki favors. Despite his inability to remember his name, where he lived or how he ended up in Helsinki, his laconic wit endears him to the homeless families and individuals who take him in. Neither he nor the other homeless people are what one expects to see on the screen, especially if you are used to Hollywood conventions.

In a January 17th 2003 interview with the Guardian, the director explained his choice of characters and the actors who play them. "Yes, the people who are hidden. The ugly people, as some critics have called them. But then who is good-looking? Bruce Willis? I think he is ugly. Horribly ugly. Totally unable to act, and totally ugly. So I will stick with my ugly people."

In a quintessential Kaurismäki scene, the main character is shown applying for a numbered account "like they have in Swiss banks" at a thread-bare Finnish bank with a single employee. While trying to explain to the bemused female teller why this is necessary--he can't remember his name--a portly shotgun-toting man with a walrus moustache storms into the bank to take out all the cash from his account, which has been frozen unfairly by the bank. When he notices a camera over her shoulder, he destroys it with a shotgun blast. That wasn't necessary, the teller advises him. The bank, which has just been taken over by a Korean firm, is so poor that the camera doesn't work.

Although the film is concerned mainly with the lead character's plight, you get a strong sense that the entire economy is unraveling like a Scandinavian Argentina. Since Tango is more popular in Finland than any other country outside of Argentina, one is reminded that there is a strong cultural as well as an economic affinity. (See: http://virtual.finland.fi/finfo/english/tango4.html)

Homelessness is rife since people can't find jobs. When one of the amnesiac's neighbors invites him to "dine out", we discover that the restaurant is a Salvation Army soup kitchen. The amnesiac becomes infatuated immediately with Irma, who is ladling out soup and he eventually asks her out for a date. Their romance is one of the most touching I have seen in movies in a very long time. She, like him, is middle-aged. She is also anxious to enjoy the earthly pleasures that Salvation Army service has denied her. Irma is played by Kati Outinen, who starred in "Match Factory Girl" (Tulitikkutehtaan tyttö), a 1989 work that like "Man Without a Past" and the 1988 "Ariel" revolve around the struggle of factory workers to survive in an economically and psychologically hostile bourgeois society.

For Kaurismäki, who is no Ken Loach, there are no obvious solutions to these problems. Simple solidarity between those at the bottom of the food chain seems to offer the only alternative to a hostile world. In an interview with the Independent on January 19, 2003 he gave some insight into his artistic and political orientation. He said that the last film he saw and loved was Chaplin's "Modern Times" Essentially, Kaurismäki's proletarian heroes are like the little tramp, who while being chewed up and spit out by the industrial system, longs to find a simpler and more human way to exist. When the amnesiac is shown planting a few potatoes into the soil near his new container home in the hope that he will be able to feed himself through the winter, he captures the spirit of Chaplin's ever-optimistic factory worker.