ARIEL
A film review by Serdar Yegulalp
Copyright 1997 Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: A deeply cynical and yet gaspingly funny movie about going so far down on the food chain that you come out on the top again.
ARIEL, by the longtime Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki, is not quite like anything I've ever seen. That's good, because in a world where movies are becoming increasingly noisy, interchangeable and dull, seeing something like ARIEL is like drinking Evian after a twenty-year diet of flat Pepsi.
Turo Pajala, a skinny-faced actor who has this way of almost daring us to care about him, plays Taisto Kasurinen, a coal miner whose job has just evaorated. Finland is switching from coal to nuclear power, and so his job has come rather abruptly to an end. His drinking buddy gives him the keys to his Cadillac (worth its weight in gold in that country), then backs up into the men's room and puts a bullet into his head. Taisto's reaction is more or less worrying about where the hell he's going to park the damned thing. Everything in life is an imposition, and the movie walks us through that frame of mind, one fuck-up at a time.
Taisto gets screwed about sixty percent of the time. He drives south to look for a job and gets mugged; he can't get anything together. His life takes a turn for the better when he meets a meter maid and her young son, and the three of them form something like a family, but even then Taisto has trouble. Eventually, he hatches a scheme to steal tons of money and split for the States, and he manages to get away with it -- sort of -- but by that time the movie has already made itself clear: No matter what you do, you get shafted somehow.
What's amazing about the movie is that as bitter and cynical as it is, it's also a pleasure to watch unfold. Nothing in the movie is dictated by idiotic Hollywod plotting standards -- we're not in this to find out if the heist goes off as planned (they spill the cash on the sidewalk, for God's sake!), but rather what we learn about human behavior along the way. Kaurismaki understands how people really talk to each other, and how they pretend to listen -- the conversations in this movie are unleavened with sitcom pseudo-speak, and are not interested in the slick stratagems of go-getters. They just want to get through the day without having the sky fall on their head. What Taisto slowly figures out, it seems, is that he's hardly alone in getting screwed, even though it sure feels like it.
ARIEL, then, is about people who have their head bowed down by life. They're not interested in saving the day, or even seizing it. They are trying to bail out of the whole damn cycle, because it's done nothing but take advantage of them. Kaurismaki is the only moviemaker I know who's willing to take people like that and make them his characters -- and on that basis alone, I intend to find as many of his movies as I can.
Four out of four parking tickets.
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