Helsinki - “I would not be surprised,” Olli Alho, Finland’s leading film historian wrote in 1987, “if sometime in the 1990s…Finland would turn into an interesting cinema country, as Poland, Hungary, Switzerland, Sweden, and Czechoslovakia have all been in their turn.”
Traditionally, Finland’s small film industry has produced rural comedies and nature driven fantasies geared exclusively for that hermetic Nordic country of lakes and forests and midnight sun. Occasionally, a Finnish product of universal appeal will become an international hit, as Edwin Laine’s great anti-war epic, “The Unknown Soldier” did in 1954, but generally speaking Finnish film has been an acquired taste accessible only to Finnish speakers.
Unfortunately too, there has been little government support for cinema in Finland, especially as compared with neighboring Sweden, with the result that aspiring Finnish filmmakers of talent or more commercial outlook have fled to Stockholm, Paris and other points.
At least one such disaffected Finn, Renny Harlin, the director of “Die Hard II” and “The Adventures of Ford Fairlane” (whose first made-in-Finland film “Born American” was partly censored because of excessive violence” has achieved mega-success in Hollywood, while embracing what many Finns consider alien values.
Not so with Aki and Mika Kaurismaki. For the past decade this pair of Finnish writer-directors and their modest, Helsinki-based production company, Villealfa (named after Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 New Wave hit, "Alphaville"), has been issuing a steady stream of features and shorts employing Finnish settings and Finnish themes, with their own puckish twist, and garnering increasing attention from the greater cinema world.
The younger and more driven of the brothers, 33-year-old Aki, has rapidly gained a reputation as the new enfant terrible of European cinema. His 1989 feature, “Ariel”, a Finnish film noir that is a sort of cross between “High Sierra” and “Breathless” but set in the even more shadowy world of Helsinki, created a sensation at last year’s Cannes Film Festival.
More recently, “Leningrad Cowboys Go America,” his cracked paean to the American road, about a hirsute Finnish polka band turned American rock combo, opened to more rave reviews.
In addition to their own filmmaking activities, Mika and Aki are co-sponsors of the world’s northernmost film festival, the Midnight Sun Film Festival, which is held every year in the Lappish city of Sodankyla, at a time in June when the sun never sets.
And Villealfa is also active in distributing foreign films in Finland, including those of Aki’s close friend and filmic comrade, Jim Jarmusch (who makes an appearance as a used-car dealer in "Cowboys”).
Even the Finnish government is finally taking note of the Kaurismaki’s creative machinations. The government recently announced that it was adding 45 million markaa (about 12.5 million) for grants to independent filmmakers in the next year’s budget.
Escape, a key theme of traditional Finnish film, is also a central theme of both the Kaurismaki brothers’ films, although they tend to stand it on its head. Thus, in Mika’s best-known film, “Helsinki (Napoli) All Night,” made in 1985, the comic hero, a Finnish expatriate working as a cab driver in Berlin, flees to Finland while eluding the German mafia, after botching a job for them.
By contrast, Aki’s less voluble characters are usually trying to escape in the other direction - namely, out of Finland. For example, in “Ariel”, the star-crossed lovers wind up on a freighter headed for Mexico, while a Finnish rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” wafts incongruously over the credits.
The seemingly lobotomized musician-ber-serkers of “Leningrad Cowboys” also wind up in Mexico, after cutting a cacophonic swath across the American South.
Clearly, Aki Kaurismaki has mixed feelings about his homeland. The Finland depicted in his work is a country afflicted by the spiritual malaise of urban capitalism, yet leavened with humor and simplicity of a society that is still rural at heart. Thus, at its best, as in “Ariel,” or the 1986 “Shadows in Paradise”, perhaps Kaurismaki’s most accomplished work, a romance between an inexpressive garbage man and a suller supermarket cashier, is oeuvre attains a certain balladic quality.
Aki's mixed feelings about his little understood native land were also evident during a recent interview in New York, while the director was in town to promote “Cowboys” and present two of his newest works, “Match Factory Girl” and “ I Hired a Contract Killer,” to the New York Film Festival.
He confesses to a strong nostalgia for the days of Urho Kekkonen, the benevolent tyrant of a president who dominated Finland during the 1960s and 1970s - which helps explain why there is a picture of Kekkonen in almost all his films (he’s the bald one with the glasses).
“He was a man,” the laconic, leather-jacketed Finn said, referring to Kekkonen, in between bursts of his ever-present cigarette.
Since Kekkonen’s forced retirement in 1981 - just about the time Kaurismaki, a former journalist, began making films - “everything has gone downhill.” So why make films in Finland? “Because I am Finnish,” he shrugged.
And what would he do if he had more money? “I would make worse films.” End of interview.
Aki’s most frequently used actor, and the closest thing that Finland has to a film star, the irrepressible Matti Pellonpaa, is considerably more expansive than his friend, Ak; the two have known each other since growing up in the back lots of the Finnish Capital.
Indeed, an interview with the shaggy-haired, self-consciously bohemian actor, who plays Vladimir, the band manager in “Cowboys”, was something of a riot; it took place, as do most of the actor’s social and professional meetings, at the Kosmos, a kind of Finnish Brown Derbycum-hangout where the young Helsinki intelligentsia congregates on weekday evenings. Pellonpaa and Kaurismaki are main attractions.
“I am a Communist because I am not a Communist!” the tipsy thespian boomed, while receiving a steady stream of solicitous female fans. “There are no small roles - there are only small actors!”
Subsequent, soberer exchanges revealed the 39-year-old actor to be seriously devoted to his craft, to the Kaurismakis, and to Finland, in about that order. Pellonpaa attributes his success, in part, to his dual training as an actor and a cameraman; indeed, he began working for the Kaurismakis as a key grip.
Nevertheless, he assigns the greatest part of the credit to Aki Kaurismaki’s faith in him. “Who would've thought that I could become a star with this face,” Pellonpaa said, smiling and pointing at his grizzled visage.
The actor’s success is a relative thing. He earns only about $30,000 a year, still not enough to afford his own apartment in super-expensive Helsinki. And he doesn’t have an agent; there aren’t many agents in Finland - yet. And Pellonpaa, who likes the coziness of the Finnish film scene, such as it is, would like to keep it that way. As far as he is concerned, he gets enough attention at the Kosmos.
“I want to be an actor - not a poster!’he exhorted, once again in his cups, before sliding back to his table and waiting coterie.