Dir. Aki Kaurismäki
The Man Without a Past manages to be simultaneously laconic and warm. Quick plot summary: “M” (as he is referred to in the credits; played by Markku Peltola) gets beaten up and loses his identity; he then finds a community among the poor of Helsinki. Amnesia is a favourite device of storytellers (see Memento, for instance), of course, so much of the philosophical grounds trodden here have been explored. But whereas in most works amnesia is a cause for agita, this film seems to be a cinematic “oh well”. You can almost feel M shrug and proceed on with life. Today is the beginning of the rest of your life? For M, it really is.
For a film that remains so deliberately detached, The Man Without a Past is actually quite attached to the idea of a certain form of impulse. Not the passionate form of impulse we associate with movie romances (the first kiss between M and Irma, his girlfriend, is a very chaste stolen kiss on the cheek), but the kind of impulse that is almost rote, circumventing rather than overwhelming thoughts of motivations. In the movie, people do things and things happen, and life moves on. Kaurismäki never feels the need to justify his characters’ words and actions, and rightly so - the deadpan humour and non-sequiturs all depend on a certain clinical approach. So no one really has a past in the movie: Irma has never fallen in love before; the Salvation Army band has (improbably, one feels) never heard “rhythm music” before. When the past intrudes (when the bank robber talks about his troubles with the bank; when the existence of a wife is revealed), its consequences are quickly dispatched with. It’s almost as though each moment is a discrete moment of experience, not necessarily connected to anything that came previously.
Having said that, I can’t get the nagging question out of my head - why does M not go straight to a hospital or the authorities with the problem of his missing identity? Sure, once the authorities do appear they’re not particularly pleasant but that in large part is because he’s ambling around during the most dispassionate bank robbery ever depicted on film. I suppose it’s part of the world-view of the film: the loss of the past is just another one of those events that occur, and we continue our lives from there. And if time isn’t a big worry to you - at one point, M sits in jail for two days, a fact which never perturbs him and which we don’t even notice until it’s mentioned - then the past probably doesn’t matter.
One of the best parts of Leningrad Cowboys Go America, apart from the title, was that in that movie Kaurismäki never condescended to his characters there. Here it’s no different - no one is mocked, and I felt a surprising warmth toward these very coolly played characters. Take the Salvation Army band, for instance. They still retain some of their geekiness even after discovering the saving power of “rhythm music”, but you never feel anything but warmth for their attempts at rocking out. And Tahti as Hannibal the dog gives easily one of the best canine performances I’ve ever seen on film. Roll over Beethoven.
Random notes: Time really did stop for me at this film - for once I crossed the hour mark without looking at my watch (watch-watching isn’t the greatest habit, but it does give me an idea of how writers and directors are pacing their films)… Certainly this was a very different view of Finland compared to the yuppie Lovers and Leavers - even the lighting felt different. Lovers and Leavers seemed to be shot in the cool summer light, while The Man Without a Past seems to catch that brief winter light - the former seems rosy, the latter clinical. Of course, my impressions of when the films were made may not actually be the truth… The bureaucratic showdown at the police station, with subsection topping subsection; and the attempts of Anttila (Sakari Kuosmanen) to sic Hannibal on M are two of the funniest filmic moments I’ve seen all year… The names on the tip of my tongue were David Hume and Heraclitus, who asked in various ways how we can know things when really everything is experienced only for one particular moment, and the connection between the past and future is just flow in a “stream of impressions”. Stands very much in line with the concept of each moment in time being a discrete moment, although I’m not articulating this idea particularly well.