While shadows and empty spaces pervade Naomi Kawase’s search for her absent father in Embracing, the images in Katatsumori are tactile and suffused in light – a stark contrast that conveys Kawase’s deep affection towards her 80 year old maternal great aunt and adoptive mother, Uno. In hindsight, the implied coldness of the film’s preface […]
Naomi Kawase’s Embracing is both an evocation of, and disjunction from, Jonas Mekas’s diaristic memory films, a journey in search of a lost past through the empty spaces and resigned silence of an unreconciled – and incomplete – present. This sense of absence and longing is revealed in the film’s opening sequence: the sight of […]
The Man Without a Past is another understated, idiosyncratic, and hilarious offering from Aki Kaurismäki. A man (Markku Peltola) suffers amnesia after being violently attacked while napping on a park bench. A poor, kindhearted family nurses him back to health and introduces him to the social services of the Salvation Army, and to the shy […]
An early episode in Drifting Clouds encapsulates the wry, droll, yet affectionate fusion of pathos and comedy that has come to define Aki Kaurismäki’s idiosyncratic cinema. A diligent and conscientious maître d’ named Ilona (Kati Outinen) attends to the dwindling, aging clientele of a once popular, upscale postwar restaurant called Dubrovnik, before being summoned into […]
Amid the mechanical din of the automated assembly line is the quiet despair of a lost soul. Her name is Iris (Kati Outinen), a dour, impassive young woman who oversees the labeling of matchbox packages. She performs her task with silent, methodical precision: removing duplicates, moistening unaffixed labels, tamping down curled edges. Riding home on […]
Taisto (Turo Pajala) is the archetypal Kaurismäki anti-hero. His unkempt, impassive demeanor serves as a disarming, impenetrable defense mechanism against the seeming absurdity of his hapless life. The film opens to the activity of a mine shutdown, as Taisto and his coworkers resignedly look on as the explosives are detonated. A disillusioned friend gives Taisto […]