Before
Aki Kaurismaki came on his own and became the face of Finnish cinema, his elder
brother Mika had already been a filmmaker of reasonable repute, only to be
superseded by his younger sibling in whose launch, in a subtle note of wry
irony worthy of a Kaurismaki, he had a strong hand. With its droll, deadpan and
darkly humorous tale of laconic and ‘outsider’ protagonists, with a cold, wan
and gloomy Helsinki forming the backdrop, Zombie
and the Ghost Train, which was also Mika’s first independent production. The
film tells the tale of its aptly named protagonist Zombie (Silu Seppälä), a
rickety, drifting, self-destructive and music-loving guy, who doesn’t have the
aptitude or inclination of leading the life of a regular Joe. He’s neither a
rebel nor a non-conformist – he’s a classic elucidation of a slacker who just
can’t be anyone but himself. He’s tried his hand at a number of regular
professions, but to no avail. There are just two things he loves doing –
playing music and drinking, and not necessarily in that order; hence, despite
the best efforts of his girlfriend Marjo (Marjo Leinonen) and his best friend
Harri (Matti Pellonpää), who leads a curiously titled pop-band Mulefukkers
Zombie. Harri even goes as far as Istanbul to bring back Zombie who’s on a
self-exile, but he’s so far down the bottle and barrel by now that both
silently acknowledge to each other that he’s just beyond any hope for
redemption or salvation. Despite its hilarious interludes, idiosyncratic
developments and a few touches of sentimentality, the film was poignant and relentlessly
downbeat with its heavy dose of alcoholism, extreme social alienation and a
seemingly unstoppable march towards self-ruination.
Director: Mika Kaurismaki
Genre: Black Comedy/Urban Drama
Language: Finnish/Turkish/English
Country: Finland
Alexander
Kluge, one of the key members of New German Cinema, made his debut with the
jazzy, freewheeling, acerbic and formally experimental film Yesterday Girl that had Nouvelle Vague
written all over it. Adapted from his short story Anita G., it provided an episodic account of the tragic take of its
protagonist who, upon migrating from the closed Communist space of East Germany
to the flagrantly capitalist economy of West Berlin, finds it increasingly
difficult to adjust to a new world that, in essence, is as impinging on her
freedom to live as did her former world. Anita (played by the director’s sister
Alexandra Kluge) is a derelict and a refugee who indulges in one odd job after
another but rarely to any avail. Her most comfortable time turns out to be
during the brief liaison she has as a mistress to a married civil servant.
However, when the affair ends abruptly, she gets stuck in a labyrinthine
quagmire wherein each step leads to further entanglement and downslide, and she
starts indulging in petty crimes to meet ends. The poignant tale of this lost
and drifting soul provided a biting satire on the presumption that the West,
with its free economy and freedom of choice, is a better option by default –
her messy life, glaring financial constraints, and the stifling and distrusting
role of social institutions made for a blistering commentary on the
afore-mentioned point of view. The dazzling B/W photography, striking usage of
montages, the disjointed narrative, the deliberate digressions, and the palpably
poignant, but never cloying, performance of the hapless protagonist, added up
to a captivating concoction of new-age aesthetics and sharp socio-political
critique reminiscent of Godard's Vivre Sa Vie.
Director: Alexander Kluge
Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Political Drama/Avant-Garde
Language: German
Country: Germany
Monteiro’s
provocative, personal and thoroughly brilliant ‘Comedy of Deus’ trilogy was brought to a marvelous closure with As Bodas de Deus. Even if it didn’t have
the underlying personal melancholia of Recollections of the Yellow House or the gleeful perversity of A Comedia de Deus, in terms of sheer thematic scope and audacity,
this was possibly the most ambitious of the lot. Joao de Deus (Monteiro), now a
banished, broken and discarded sad old man post his disturbing meltdown with
which the previous film ended, is eating a frugal lunch at a secluded park by
the river when he’s visited by a mysterious man who identifies himself as a
messenger of god and gifts him bags stashed with cash. And thus begins a
strange journey, that smacks of déjà vu for those who’re familiar with the
trilogy, wherein he reaches a stage of comfort and respectability – in this
case someone for whom both luck and money are squarely on his side – only to
once again touch nadir when fortune suddenly quits on him. Two parallel
narrative strands played out – in an act of blind generosity, he saves a cherubic
girl, installs her at a convent, and does acts of charity there even though
he’s anything but a believer; meanwhile he makes the acquaintance of a wealthy
Arab prince with whom he engages in an all-night game of high-stake poker, only
to win everything that the suave gambling addict possesses, including his saucy
and seductive wife in the final round. The film’s bone-dry humour, leisurely
pacing and visual richness – it was dazzlingly photographed using exquisite
single takes – provided the perfect accompaniment to its biting irreverence
towards religion, authority and morality, and its deftly meditative tone.
Director: Joao Cesar Monteiro
Genre: Drama/Black Comedy/Religious Satire
Language: Portuguese
Country: Portugal
A Comédia de Deus, the dryly comic and
delectably perverse second chapter in Monteiro’s ambitious, fabulously staged, and
quietly personal ‘Comedy of Deus trilogy’, was thematically the most
audacious of the lot in the way it pushed the boundaries of everyday morality. The
title provided a cheeky interplay between the curiously named protagonist and a
deliriously cosmic sense of humour that had its beginning in Recollections of the Yellow House and was further upped in As Bodas de Deus. Taking
off where the last film ended, Joao de Deus is now employed as the manager of
an ice-cream parlour in Lisbon courtesy the shop owner’s philanthropy. He’s
become renowned for his closely guarded recipe, the profundity with which he
trains the girls employed in the establishment for serving the customers, and
his obsession with personal hygiene; off-work, he’s possibly the world’s
greatest collector of a certain specimen that no one would ever think of
inculcating as a hobby. During the course of his employment, this ageing,
soft-spoken, kindly, lonely and glibly eccentric man charms a new recruit at
the parlour into a tender relationship which traverses across various paradigms
ranging from teacher-student to lovers. However, his fragile social order goes
for a nose-dive when his barely managed self-control experiences a deeply disconcerting
meltdown as he decides to seduce the pubescent daughter of the local butcher, leading
to nasty consequences. The leisurely pace, aesthetics, exquisite single-takes
and idiosyncratic tone were complemented by the film’s meticulous texture,
degenerate world view, risque storyline and delightful sensuousness. The hilarious dance gig of the
neurotic Joao as he, purportedly, teaches his fiancée to swim, made for an
utterly memorable sequence and perfectly captured the film’s irreverent essence.
Director: Joao Cesar Monteiro
Genre: Black Comedy/Social Satire
Language: Portugeuse
Country: Portugal
Regarding
characters created by directors and played by themselves on screen in multiple
films, none match the enduring popularity and sheer brilliance of Chaplin’s The
Tramp and Tati’s Monsieur Hulot. Portuguese filmmaker João César Monteiro’s ageing,
gangly, chain-smoking, neurotic, soft-spoken, lascivious, kindly, amoral, fetishistic,
pseudo-philosophical and self-destructive alter-ego, a quintessential ‘dirty
old man’ persona, reminiscent of Woody’s self-deprecatory and
semi-autobiographical portrayals, João de Deus, in his wry, quirky, darkly funny
and deadpan ‘Trilogy of Deus (God)’, ought
to be a contender for the above ranks despite its relative obscurity. Recollections of the Yellow House, the marvelous,
dryly comedic and deliciously cheeky 1st chapter of the trilogy,
which also comprised of A Comédia de Deus
and As Bodas de Deus, chronicled the quirky
travails of the penurious protagonist residing in the titular boarding house in
Lisbon. He is thoroughly besotted with the beautiful clarinet-playing daughter
of his puritanical landlady Dona Violeta (Manuelade Freiras) and
surreptitiously fetishizes on her, his loins are constantly under attack by the
bedbugs but Dona refuses to accept his complaints, he becomes engaged in an
unemotional relationship with a sad prostitute looking for solace, and when the
object of his desire dies while getting an abortion, he experiences a rather
ludicrous psychological meltdown leading to incarceration. Monteiro resorted to
very long takes, stretches of silence and the idiosyncratic interactions
between the characters, to delectably capture the seedy physical environs and
the lonely, vacillating and degenerate old man’s complex psyche with a deviant
sense of aesthete; the end result, hence, was in equal measures mordant and
poignant.
Director: Joao Cesar Monteiro
Genre: Black Comedy/Social Satire
Language: Portuguese
Country: Portugal
