Shadows in Paradise

A bad date at the bingo parlor: Kati Outinen and Matti Pellonpää

Aki Kaurismäki's Shadows in Paradise, from 1986, is the first distinctive Kaurismäki feature. Matti Pellonpää and Kati Outinen play Nikander and Ilona, a couple whose rocky romance we witness through the course of the film. Pellonpää ended up appearing in 18 Kaurismäki features and Outinen five. Most of the supporting cast reappear in Kaurismäki films multiple times. Along with his nascent stock company, almost all of the attributes of the filmmaker's work are fully formed and on display in Shadows in Paradise: a concern with the economic struggles and romantic travails of working class people, deadpan humor, and an unfussy visual style.

The jobs of Kaurismäki's character are central to their identities, a trait he shares with, of all people, Howard Hawks; another unfussy visual stylist. The credit sequence establishes Nikander's daily routine driving a trash truck and collecting garbage. It is a model of classical filmmaking in which there is not a wasted shot, something that holds true for the remainder of the film's scant 74 minutes. We glimpse multiple times that totem of the capitalist work place: the punch clock. Nikander and Ilona meet cute at her place of work, a supermarket where she works as a cashier. There, she utter her first magic words to Nikander, "37.20." Workplaces are shown to be cutthroat, but the director tosses off the message instead of beating the viewer over the head. As the manager of the supermarket says to Ilona when he lays her off, "A supermarket is a merciless machine." Worse is the fate of a co-worker of Nikander's who dreams of owning his own trucking concern and building a better future for himself. He drops dead of a heart attack on the job before those dreams can be fulfilled.

The world of Kaurismäki would be very bleak without the vein of humor he provides. The stoicism of his characters is pronounced to the point of absurdity. Compared to Kaurismäki, the characters in other Scandinavian films, like those of Joachim Trier, seem animated. During the course of their romance, Nikander is able to open up to Ilona about his meagre aspirations, but won't reveal to her his first name. He is an extremely diffident and clumsy Casanova. He takes her to a bingo parlor on their first date which almost immediately puts the kibosh on their relationship. His enticement for a second date is even worse: let's go see my institutionalized sister. What a card! Yet, Nikander's caveman straightforwardness eventually wins over Ilona. She briefly dallies with the manager of a department store, but ultimately decides she is not cut out to join the petit bourgeoisie. When Nikander threatens to punch out her new swain, she realizes she has found her true lug.

The other leavening agent in the dour films of Kaurismäki is his use of music, both on the soundtrack and in live performance. Kaurismäki loves to use rock music for his transitional scenes. The scenes of people in transit in Shadows in Paradise almost all feature blaring rock instrumentals. The live performances range from cocktail jazz in bourgeois haunts to the Schlager music that accompanies the working class drinking themselves to sweet oblivion at their haunts. It is the counterpoint to their life of toil, a brief respite until the workers trudge back to the salt mines. The pattern repeats in most of the best of Kaurismäki's work: Ariel, Fallen Leaves, The Match Factory Girl, La Vie de Boheme, Drifting Clouds, The Man Without a Past, and Le Havre.

Madonna of the Seven Moons

Phyllis Calvert and Stewart Granger strike a pose

Arthur Crabtree's Madonna of the Seven Moons is a ridiculous melodrama released by Gainsborough Pictures in 1945. Unlike most of the Gainsborough romantic melodramas which are set in Restoration England, the picture is set in Italy before the Second World War. The picture centers on Maddalena (Phyllis Calvert) who, as the picture begins, is a teen being educated in a remote convent. In the first reel, Maddalena is raped by a peasant, the subsequent trauma triggers a "dual personality" in her with tragic repercussions. The film leaps two decades ahead and finds Maddalena married to a rich aristocrat (John Stuart, suitably dull as dishwater) and living in Rome. They are awaiting the arrival of their daughter Angela (Patricia Roc) who has been abroad in the UK for the past five years attending finishing school. She is not her mother's little girl anymore.

Whereas Maddalena has her hair up and is dressed primly. Angela has her hair down and shows as much skin as the British censors would allow. One of the many absurdities of the picture is that Ms. Calvert was only four months older than her onscreen daughter, Ms. Roc. Another is that the notion that the curvy Ms. Roc could have been birthed by the more boyish Ms. Calvert. Yet another is that even though almost all of the characters are Italian they speak with pronounced British accents. I don't think modern audiences can suspend this much disbelief. However, I must say I enjoyed some aspects of the picture. Peter Glenville has the most ridiculously pronounced British accent, but he superbly embodies an oily rake named Sandro. Angela succeeds in loosening up her tightly wound Ma, but an incident at a ball triggers her split personality.

This is when the script of the film, based on Margery Lawrence's novel goes as cuckoo as that justly forgotten author. We subsequently learn that Maddalena has had these episodes before in which she has abandoned hubby and child for a year at a time and then returned offering no explanation. While her husband dithers during her absence, the audience happily follows Maddalena to Florence where we meet her feisty doppelgänger, Rosanna. Calvert gets to let her hair down and show some cleavage as Rosanna. You can tell Calvert is having some fun with the role, unlike her clenched performance as Maddalena. Whenever Maddalena is having a traumatic flashback she curls her lip like Carol Burnett in her old comedy skits lampooning 40s movies and quakes. She looks like she is digesting a rotten apple and I suppose she is. Luckily, Rosanna has a dashing thief for a lover named Nino who is played by Stewart Granger. Granger adds some dash to the film without putting too much sauce on the pasta.

Stewart Granger and Phyllis Calvert

Granger and Calvert had both been featured in 1943's The Man in Grey which had been a big hit for Gainsborough and on which Crabtree had been the cinematographer. Madonna of the Seven Moons was his first effort as a director, both a reward for past services and a concession to wartime scarcity. Crabtree's pedestrian direction is the weakest aspect of the film. The lighting looks good, but the choreography of sequences is stilted. Even when he tries something relatively outlandish, a circle dolly around Angela after she has been slipped a mickey, it has little impact or emotional heft. The film's Carnival in Florence is especially feeble compared to similar sequences in Sternberg's films. The ludicrous script could only have been brought to fruition by a director with the audacity of a Sternberg, Hitchcock or Buñuel. Instead, what we have is an enjoyably bad movie. 

Neighboring Sounds

Irma Brown, WJ Solha and Gustavo Jahn     

Kleber Mendonça Filho's Neighboring Sounds is set amidst a three block section of the coastal Brazilian city of Recife. The 2013 picture depicts interconnected lives that range across class and racial spectrums. The main character if there is one is a young mother named Bia (Maeve Jinkings) bedeviled by a neighbors' yapping dog who won't shut up at night. Slightly higher up the economic ladder is Joao (Gustavo Jahn) who manages the condo complex his grandpa Francisco (W. J. Solha) owns. We meet Joao after he has drunkenly hooked up with Sofia (Irma Brown). The movie follows the romantic arc of their relationship. A group of sinister seeming men arrive in the neighborhood promoting themselves as a security team, but they have really arrived to settle a lifelong vendetta. When the score is settled, it brings the film full circle back to the days of exploitive sugar plantations shown in period photographs that commence the film.

The film is a cross cut look at society, like many of Altman's films especially Short Cuts. As with Altman's best films, the acting is exceptional. Some of the cast are amateurs, but you can barely tell. Even Mr. Solha who delivers a marvelous portrait of a fading patriarch boasted a scant six film acting credits. Part of the verisimilitude is due to the flow of Mr Mendonça's direction. His self-written script boasts a number of weighty themes, such as European emigration to Brazil in the 20th century, but they are not trumpeted as if on a soapbox. Rather Mr. Mendonça adroitly slips his themes fluidly into the criss-crossing rivulets of Neighboring Sounds. A part of the mix, not surprisingly gives the title, is the interesting soundscape constructed by Mendonça and the talented DJ Dolores. The film mixes pop songs (Queen, Jorge Ben) with a score that mixes electronica with found sounds, like in the work of Tom Ze. The soundtrack becomes one with the lives of the characters who use sound to vent micro-aggressions and camouflage murder.

Neighboring Sounds has the density of a great novel. I was fully engrossed by it. Mendonça has gone on to greater international acclaim with Bacurau and The Station Agent, but I think Neighboring Sounds is still his best film because of its polyphonic expansiveness.