Review of The Man Without a Past (2002) by Kenneth L — 07 May 2013

This was my first time seeing a movie by the Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismaki, but I think I can see why he's relatively popular (as Finnish filmmakers go, anyway). This is an extremely wry, deadpan comedy - so poker-faced that many people might not even notice it's a comedy. It's a small-scale film about sad people in a sad place, but it's somehow very funny.

The story is pretty simple: we see a man (Markku Peltola) get off the train somewhere and go sit on a bench. Then he is abruptly beaten nearly to death with a baseball bat by some random thugs. He's declared dead at the hospital, but then gets up and walks out. He has no memory whatsoever of who he is, but somehow ends up moving into the local outcast community, nearly all of whom live in storage containers by the shore. He strikes up a relationship with a lonely Salvation Army worker (Kati Outinen) who's almost as bad off as he is. And that's pretty much the movie.

Like I said, everything about this movie is utterly deadpan, especially the performances. Peltola's performance is interesting - you can't really say the character is especially likable and sympathetic, but then that's because he can't remember what kind of a person he was. He's neither friendly nor mean because he can't remember which he is supposed to be. So he's just kind of there, existing. Outinen is also quite good as Irma, the Salvation Army worker. All of the characters speak and act in very flattened, almost depressed ways - they're kind of like the characters in a Wes Anderson movie, only more so. The camerawork just tends to regard them neutrally.

Like I said, the movie is indeed a comedy. The characters keep finding themselves in ridiculous situations, but since they don't react in the way we've been trained to expect characters to react to such things, the humor of it all might slip by some viewers. It's a minimalist film that doesn't harp on its own minimalism. There's also a genuinely strange beauty to the film's locations. It feels like an "acquired taste" sort of thing, so I can't guarantee you'd like it. But I did.