New Musical Express 17/02/1990
There's more to Finland than reindeer and midnight sun. For a start there's Aki Kaurismaki, the sardonic film director responsible for the off-the-wall Leningrad Cowboys Go America. Ben Thompson discovers mordant Finnish wit.
It's not your everyday Finnish film director who excuses himself for being late with the revelation that he's been up all night in Willesden Green drinking with Nicky Tesco.
The former lead singer with the Members and all round punk rock legend is no mere casual acquaintance; he also turns up in Kaurismaki's latest film Leningrad Cowboys Go America, leading nine fictional long-lost Scandinavian cousins in a crowd pleasing rendition of 'Born to be Wild' in a deep South Redneck bar.
Leningrad Cowboys, the third of Kaurismaki's films to be released in Britain after last year's lovably terse Ariel and the soon to be released Hamlet Goes Business, is undoubtably his most commercial film to date. A wildly amusing transatlantic cultural revenge fantasy in which an endearingly dodgy Siberian rock 'n' roll band sent to America because "they'll take any shit there", journey the length of that great continent in a second-hand Cadillac laying waste to its popular culture.
From the hilarious opening sequence, in which the lucky viewer is introduced to a magical frozen world in which every living being has a foot-long quiff (including dogs and babies) and all the humans wear winkle-pickers, the film is a beautifully laconic barrage of aural and visual delights.
Much of what seems strangest in Kaurismaki's films turns out to be beased in reality. The Leningrad Cowboys for example are a real band, known at home, where they have been popular and fully functioning since 1972 ("all the best musicians in Finland have been in that band once") as the Sleepy Sleepers. Don't they mind being referred to as the worst band in the world?
"Sleepy Sleepers really is bad band - that's it's reputation and they have very good humour about it."
A sardonic 32-year old whose face has seen a bit of weather, Aki Kaurismaki began film-making via his involvement with the work of his brother Mika, (the Kaurismaki brothers presently account for around a third of the Finnish film industry's entire output) with whom he founded The Midnight Sun Film Festival - the only international film festival to be held 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle.
How do you come to be a film director in a country whose cinematic tradition had previously boiled down to Erik Blomberg's 1953 epic The White Reindeer, the moving saga of a woman who can change herself into a reindeer?
"I was no good for anything else," he confesses with good grace. "I was a film freak - I saw six films a day, I had a timetable for three months ahead. I would see three films in the archives, one in the film club, one in the commercial cinema, then I would run home to see one on television. It was crazy - I was like a deep-sea fish..."
Aki has directed seven films since his 1983 debut Crime and Punishment, in which he re-wrote Dostoyevsky's masterpiece around the life of a Helsinki slughterhouse worker. A startling back catalogue awaits the attention of on-the-ball distribution companies, most enticingly a film called the Calamari Union about 17 hoodlums, all called Frank.
One of the most striking things about Kaurismaki films is the delight with which he subverts film conventions, gleefully appropriating tired genres - road movie, prison escape drama, backstage musical - manipulating them with a sense of irony which is at once dour and dazzling, and then discarding them when he gets bored. His films are distinctive not just for what he puts in but for what he leaves out.
"There are lots of things in this world that I leave to other directors, for example, so-called 'sex and violence'."
There was a scene in Crime and Punishment where a man put his hand on a woman's shoulder; Kauismaki cut it because it was "too private".
"It was just too sexy for me - these kind of things should be left to people's private lives. Also, so many directors are concentrating on the obligatory love scene in the bedroom, it's so boring, I always leave the cinema when I see it."
You can't see many films to the end now then?
"I don't see many films now anyway. When I go home I don't really feel like going to the cinema."
This is hardly surprising given his prodigious work rate - Mr Kaurismaki claims to have written, direcvted, produced and edited four films in the past year, at the same time running a successful distribution company. What's more, it's all achieved on an inspiringly low budget; Leningrad Cowboys, by Aki's reckoning 'quite expensive', cost some £350,000 shot in 30 days with one afternoon off. Hamlet Goes Business cost a scarcely believable £75,000
"If you can make a film for £70,000 why use more? Send the money to some poor people and don't use it for the film - you will make a better film with less money."
A "black and white, underground, B-movie classical drama", born out of "serious drinking with a friend", the beautifully shot Hamlet Goes Business is the only one of Kaurismaki's films which the man himself professes to like. He read the play just before shooting began, shifted the action to a modern day Finnish company boardroom, added a dog and some rubber ducks and there it was - a masterpiece.
"I think I made the blackest version of Hamlet ever... there's no-one alive in the end, all the characters in the film are dead except the dog. They all kill each other and there's nobody left except industry. It's a big industrialised Wall Street Hamlet. It's a horrible film but it's also funny..."
All Kaurismaki's films have a beautiful austere quality about them, which you could be forgiven for ascribing to the rigours of their making.
"In Finland, everyone shoots between April and August because otherwise there's only two or three hours daylight. I shot one film in October and it was already horrible. The light comes, you get the cameras out, then the light goes, so dialogues have to be very short. That's why my dialogues hadly even exist any more..."
One of Aki's continuing preoccupations is the impact of American cultural forms - rock'n'roll, sunglasses, Cadillac limousines (of which he owns three) - on environments vastly different to those which shaped them. Leningrad Cowboys' wry homage to "the backyards of America", shows this cultural exchange going full circle as the ill-fated Siberian nine-piece strive vainly to take their music back to it's roots and adapt it to the demands of it's homelands.
Kaurismaki's frenetic work rate shows no sign of flagging. He is currently hunting down East London locations for an "Ealing Studio-style comedy", I Hired a Contract Killer.
"It seems to me that British directors can't make old-fashioned British comedies any more, so I have to come here to make one for them."
The wildly industrious Kaurismaki retains a not always justified reputation as a big drinker, which he would like to lay to rest.
"When I was here, I told all the journalists that I never drink when I shoot or write, but for some reason they found it better to give the impression that I am always in the bar. The man who makes four films a year cannot always be in the bar."