Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki's exhilarating masterpiece, The Man Without A Past, arrives with an astonishing pedigree: A list of awards longer than the film itself.
Among them is an Oscar nomination as best foreign language film (this or Hero should have won, not Nowhere In Africa). Kaurismaki's film also took the grand jury prize at Cannes 2002, with co-star Kati Outinen named best actress. The film was later nominated for six European Film Awards and won the FIPRESCI international critics prize as the best of 45 Oscar entries shown at the 2003 Palm Springs Film Festival. There are numerous other honours on the list.
This hullabaloo demands that audience members who are usually reluctant to read subtitles should get over their depressing affliction immediately. The Man Without A Past, which plays in Finnish with English subtitles, is too rich, too intelligent, too deep and too accessible to ignore. This is a film for all the world to enjoy regardless of language.
The Man Without A Past is the second in Kaurismaki's Finland Trilogy, films about the indominable spirit of his home country's downtrodden working class.
The first in the trilogy was Drifting Clouds (1996), the story of a couple whose lives are ruined when they both lose their jobs. Love and courage help them triumph against the odds.
The Man Without A Past, another melancholic yet hopeful film, tells the story of a man just known as M. Arriving by train in Helsinki, he is brutally beaten by malicious thugs. Now destitute and barely alive, our hero also suffers from amnesia. He is suddenly, and literally, the man with no past.
The entire movie shows how he rebuilds his shattered existence from the ground up, carving out a unique niche among the other nearly homeless and jobless people who live in discarded shipping containers by the sea.
The saga is told with dignity, never with despair. The tone is often funny, because Kaurismaki's droll sense of humour permeates the film and lifts the spirits of every major character. As in the book and film of Steinbeck's The Grapes Of Wrath (the connection is deliberately made by Kaurismaki), the protagonists may be poor and they may be thought of as dirt by others too arrogant to see, but they can still triumph in everyday life through steel backbones and a resiliency that is worth praising and even honouring.
The acting, muted and verging on odd and robotic, is also quite wonderful, especially from Markku Peltola as M and Outinen as a Salvation Army member who helps the community. There is not a single moment when any actor falters, not even Kaurismaki's real-life dog, who is as important on-screen as most of the human characters.
There may be more energetic films around than The Man Without A Past. There are few as quietly engrossing.
(This film is rated PG)
More Movie Reviews
