"Ariel" (1988)

Behind a good artist, or a very talented artist, presides the unmistakable stamp of a great artist's influence. Just as behind Gus van Sant stands the formidable figure of Bela Tarr, so does Aki Kaurismaki loom over Jim Jarmusch. Jarmusch has spent his career attempting to reproduce exactly the sort of compact pristine emotions, the sort of stoic coolness and outlandish serenity that the finnish director so effortlessly encapsulates in films that never go past 90 minutes (all of Kaurismaki's films, according to a vow he made early in his career, are under an hour and a half). A sometime disciple of Godard's ethics of pop condensation, Kaurismaki quite rightly believes in limiting expression to its bones of purpose; yet, unlike Godard, whose intellectual arrogance comes across in even his least structured films, Kaurismaki never once takes himself too seriously.

The difference between a master and an apprentice is that the master has transcended that point of resistance so integral to the understudied artist who still grapples with his native deficiencies; while the apprentice struggles to carve out his character from the rough material of his nascent foibles, the master seeks to re-ignite the ardency of his earliest prejudices: hence the master recreates new oppositions. The master has gone so beyond his own erudition that he has imposed on himself new and novel constraints, if only to create such difficulties and problems that require incredible, pithy solutions.

Kaurismaki is such a director, who in the space of 80 minutes, describes the entire arc of cinematic expression with a few camera strokes, and shots so well-placed that they require no movement at all in a space no longer than a few seconds. Ariel is a key example of the Kaurismaki technique: some shots are so brief that they last hardly beyond 5 seconds. Yet they speak volumes, once in conjunct with a stream of similarly well-placed shots in which little to no dialogue occurs. When dialogue does occur, it is so precise in its emotional ambiguity as to arouse numerous responses; the very spare dialogue Kaurismaki does write is precious in its allusive quality, meticulous in its pathos. We witness real people who, even if the gigantic need to express themselves strangles their throats, find the means of expression in their behavior, their slight gestures, their minute but resolute acts. Kaurismaki, like Roy Andersson, finds the truth of life in cinema: real life is very much like cinema, muted by suffering and the endless struggle to survive, but enriched by the vigor of actions and by the lunatic velocity of our days, which we edit, often against our will, with the tools of our memory. And just like Roy Andersson, Kaurismaki is all the more a master of the form because he is at the root of him a congenial thinker, an artist whose good humor defies, and goes so far as to define, the wretched & the low instigations of life.

There are no living directors in the same category as Kaurismaki (or Andersson for that matter), who are as self-effacing, as ceremoniously unconcerned with high seriousness, as blithely merciless, as stridently full of deadpan good humor as he.

According to the man himself, Kaurismaki does not consider himself a 'master': "Maybe my films are not masterpieces, but they are documents of their time. That's enough for me. Masterpieces I can't do - even though I try." In a new period of film in which the average attention span of the filmgoer has considerably shortened, and the means of expression been so exhausted as to warrant technological contraptions and a pandemonium of computer graphics, Kaurismaki is a master. And Ariel is a masterpiece. The kind of film that a film school teacher should require a class to watch, only to dare them, at the end, to attempt to make the same film all over again. Perfection of economy, perfection of expression, are hard to come by. It would be useless to describe the plot of the film, or to explain its themes, or even the execution of the scenes: the film is such that its components cannot be cut up, nor its parts dismantled and displayed for testing: its editing is such that no other syntax except from what occurs from the 1st frame to the last can spell out the integral grammar of its form. Ariel remains a testament not just to Kaurismaki's wondrously thrifty technique (to which he likely owes more to Bresson than to Godard), but to the firm belief of an artist whose sheer faith in cinema, in life attaining meaning "somewhere over the rainbow" where cinema lies, overwhelms the easy nihilism, and rampant cynicism, that modern life has bred in everyone from its peons to its vaunted artists. A master is one who learns how to smile, through the grim & the pleasant, at the very close of the curtain.
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