Aki Kaurismäki counts the days after 16 winters near Oporto in Portugal and before the Cannes debut of the end of his “loser trilogy.” Hannu Martilla reports for Helsingen Sanomat. “Kaurismäki has completed work on his 15th full-length movie. Laitakaupungin valot (Lights in the Dusk)… completes the trilogy started ten years ago with Drifting Clouds. The success of this picture was followed up by The Man Without a Past, winner of the Grand Prize at [Cannes 2002]… Before the third film was in the can, movie writers were referring to Kaurismäki’s “unemployment trilogy”, and even to a “Suomi trilogy,” as Shadows in Paradise, Ariel and The Match Factory Girl “, had earlier been dubbed his “working-class trilogy”. “One is a working-class trilogy, and the other is a loser trilogy, but I don’t know which is which”, the 48-year-old director says. Here’s how they describe the new movie, focusing on “loneliness”: “In the film, which was shot in the commercial- and office-block canyons of the Helsinki district of Ruoholahti, life – through its various agents and representatives – smacks down a forlorn nightwatchman hard and in very concrete fashion. Unlike before, this time there is no human rights lawyer stepping in, sent by the Salvation Army, nor the solidarity and camaraderie of a group of other losers. When the movie has run its course, the betrayed and bludgeoned man lies dying on the ground. In Kaurismäki’s view, Man Without a Past, with its cast of good and supportive souls, was “already insufferably sickly-sweet”. “Personally, I find the theme of bullying and being knocked around a more comfortable one than excessive optimism. There is no cause for optimism, not in the film nor outside it…. The initial idea for the film was a modern, exceptionally bleak suburban milieu and a battered individual, whom I’d have liked to batter and bully to death, but my soft side got the better of me”, grins Kaurismäki.” The antagonists “drive ‘50s American cars and don’t use mobile phones even when they are ringing in to grass someone out – “Proper crooks, not your IT-criminals of today”, says Kaurismäki by way of clarification.” Of his four years of silence, Kaurismaki asks Martilla, “Has it really been that long?… Back in the day, I used to make three films a year, now it is one in three years, or in four. The old vim and vigour of youth has been blunted… No, it can’t be four years. What’s happened to all the years in between?… I wrote the screenplay in a week at the end of February, and before that I suppose I thought about it for two or three months. It used to be that a weekend was enough for the actual writing work.” Of his winter home, Kaurismäki says, “I don’t believe I will ever make a full-length feature about Portugal; it would require a greater understanding of the details of everyday life here. At one point I was going to make Juha here, as a talkie and in colour. I was already writing it when I suddenly realised I did not have the local knowledge to say what the main character would have taken with him as a snack when he went off to herd sheep.” [Photo: Hannes Heikura, Helsingin Sanomat]

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