Rikos ja rangaistus. Aki Kaurismäki. 1983. ⚂

[ten minutes pass]

I haven’t seen this one before. I started off my Kaurismäki festival with his second film (Calamari Union) by accident, because I ripped the movies in the wrong order or something.

This is a much more traditional movie than the Union, which was a goof. This is a serious adaptation of the Dostoevsky novel? And then two years passed and Kaurismäki did that goofy movie? I wonder what the story behind that was… I’m guessing… that he got money to do this movie by applying through all the proper channels, and then he couldn’t raise money for a second movie, so he just did that Calamari thing with all his pals?

I”M JUST GUESSING!

But this movie is… distressingly normal. So far.

[fifteen minutes pass]

Or is this supposed to be a parody of literary adaptations?

Hm…

[thirty minutes pass]

If this is supposed to be funny, it’s a pretty obscure joke: The gravitas of That Great Book set in the quotidian Helsinki present… But Helsinki (in 1983) looks just as exotic as 1860’s Russia. At least from this point of view.

[the end]

I’m still not sure whether this was supposed to be funny? As a drama, it kinda fails. I mean, it’s… fine…? Like any dramatisation? That is, not worth watching? But if it’s meant to be funny, it’s… not?

So I went off googling, sure that I’d find five hundred fan pages dedicated to this movie, and… there’s nothing. *crickets*

There’s like this:

Kaurismaki’s Crime and Punishment is very similar to the spirit of Dostoyevsky’s novel

Well, yes, but so?

And:

An excellent human drama, and also the beginning of a brilliant career.

So that’s all this is? A pedestrian adaptation?

Geez.

Calamari Union. Aki Kaurismäki. 1985. ⚃

Yes, indeed: I bought a box set of Aki Kaurismäki’s movies on 2K. Here’s the first one.

[five minutes pass]

Oh, man, this takes me back. Not that I’ve ever seen this movie before, but the humour is so intensely 1983. Very bizarre and pretentious, but in the best way: It’s made by someone who has indeed seen a bunch of Nouvelle Vague movies, but also Eraserhead, and who’s just goofing off. A movie for teenagers.

[an hour passes]

OK, I was really into this movie for … forty minutes? The shots are meticulously filmed; just gorgeous, and the restoration on this 2K edition makes everything look so wonderful. But it’s becoming clear that they used all the idea they had in the first fifteen minutes of the movie, and now they’re just padding until they have a feature length movie.

I mostly wonder how he got money to buy all this negative… I’m guessing the er actors are friends of his? Which would explain the extreme gender disparity, looks-wise, between the male and the female actors in this movie.

[the end]

The two horrible, horrible music numbers (used as padding) don’t help.

It’s not a good movie, but the fun bits are brilliant.

La Collectionneuse. Éric Rohmer. 1967. ⚄

I’ve sort of put Rohmer on the back burner… It’s because I love watching his movies while flying: They have that distracted quality that make them perfect to watch while eating bad airplane food and getting totally sloshed on bad airplane wine.

Oh, writing that makes me regret putting it on, because I’m so nostalgic for being on airplanes… and I always thought I hated flying! I must love it secretly!

But, well, once I’ve started watching this movie…

[the end]

Wow! This made me want to be on a plane to… Hawaii…

Anyway. Brilliant movie. That is, until the final… fifteen minutes? I loved everything about it until then: The colours, the sound of the swifts and the crickets, the amateur actors who are smiling most of the time, the gorgeous, languorous shots of the beautiful countryside, the vague non-storyline…

But then that Sam guy shows up and somehow all the charm goes out of the movie. Very strange.

So how to score that, then… it’s like a ⚅ until that point, and then it’s like ⚁…