A note on a film: Crime
and Punishment (1983)
In a particularly
impressive stroke, Kaurismäki's film - his first as director - begins with a
scene taking place in some anonymous Helsinki slaughter house. In close-up, an
insect crawls across a blood-splattered plinth. Almost immediately, a cleaver
comes down and cuts the bug in two. Ominous music begins to overwhelm the
soundtrack as we're subjected to an onslaught of emotionless, repetitive
slaughter; a montage of drab, impassive young men in overalls cleaning meat
from bone, sawing through sinew and hosing down pools of blood collected under
a procession of strung-up animal carcasses.
This first scene
introduces us to our central character, Rahikainen; a former lawyer turned
butcher, still haunted by the loss of his young fiancé some several years
before. However, it also introduces us to the theme of murder, central to both Kaurismäki's
film, and the 1866 novel by Dostoevsky on which it is based. More specifically,
it introduces us to the idea of murder as somehow existing to sustain balance;
the order of murder, as it moves down
the chain, from human, to animal, to insect, etc. It also introduces us to Kaurismäki's
characteristically ironic and deadpan sense of humour; as he illustrates, in
mundane miniature, the very essence of what the film - and, by extension, its
esteemed source material - is effectively about.
Like the novel, Kaurismäki's
modernised interpretation of Dostoevsky focuses on the attempts made by its
central character to kill a principle. Not a specific person or target, but a
concept; an ideology. Rahikainen's eventual murder of a seemingly anonymous
businessman at first seems divorced from the more conventional justifications
we might associate with the crime; such as vengeance and retribution. It
doesn't seem motivated by anger or hatred, but instead seems an almost
philosophical or moral provocation; an attempt to challenge the societal or
evolutionary order of things, as the character sees it.
In this respect, the film predicts
certain elements from Krzysztof Kieaelowski's startling Dekalog-spin off, A Short
Film About Killing (1988), which probably owes some of its own influence to the
work of Dostoevsky. Both films focus on young men cast adrift and unable to
connect to a society that seems both cold and colourless, while both films
share a thematic preoccupation with the correlation between crime and
punishment itself.
Crime and Punishment [Aki
Kaurismäki, 1983]:
A Short Film About Killing
[Krzysztof Kieaelowski, 1988]:
The similarity feels
obvious from the start. While Kaurismäki begins his film in a fully-functioning
slaughter house, Kieaelowski famously begins his own film with the image of a
dead cat hung from a railing (further accompanied by the sound of children running
away in fits of mischievous laughter). Both films evoke the crime of murder,
first in miniature, and as a precursor to later events, and both use these
crimes against non-human entities to exemplify the loveless nature of the
society that these characters are caught up in (Kieaelowski and his
screenwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz go one further by predicting the method of
execution that will eventually be favoured by the state; turning their first
image into both a personal and political foreshadowing.)
Similarly, the world
created by both filmmakers is ugly and dehumanising. Kieaelowski and his
cinematographer Sławomir Idziak favour grotesque colour filters that plunge
areas of the frame into total darkness, while saturating the remaining image in
a wash of green and yellow hues. Conversely, Kaurismäki favours heightened
minimalism. His framing is flat and perfunctory, with shots and inserts used
sparingly to provide illustration. He focuses on naturalistic location shooting
to present an inherent drabness, or dreariness, that seems to suggest
something about his protagonist; his lack of prospects and direction; the void
of hope.
A Short Film About Killing
[Krzysztof Kieaelowski, 1988]:
Crime and Punishment [Aki Kaurismäki, 1983]:
There's also something of Robert
Bresson to Kaurismäki's particular aesthetic; not just here, but as it would subsequently
develop through his later, better
films; such as Ariel (1988), Drifting Clouds (1996) and The Man Without a Past
(2002). The presentational nature of the imagery, the use of insert shots, the
pace of the editing and the very flat, mannered, almost emotionless delivery of
the actors, can't help but evoke Bresson's legacy of works, from Pickpocket
(1959) through to L'argent (1983). Pickpocket specifically is said to have been
inspired, in-part, by Dostoevsky, and the ending of that particular film is appropriately
echoed here.
Pickpocket [Robert
Bresson, 1959]:
Crime and Punishment [Aki
Kaurismäki, 1983]:
At the end of Pickpocket,
the character Michel - the titular thief - finds a kind of spiritual transcendence
through incarceration. In this sense, Bresson's film probably has a touch the "existential"
about it, as the character intentionally sets in motion a chain of events that
will see about his own personal downfall, or a kind of punishment for some perceived
weakness or failure. This, as a conception, recalls Dostoevsky, but it also
evokes some of the ideas found in Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness
(published 1943) and the predicament of the character Meursault in Albert
Camus's The Stranger (published 1942). Here the notion that "existence
precedes essence", and the idea of a character committing a crime as almost
primal scream (as well as an attempt to re-establish some kind of emotional balance
within his own personal universe) seems to inform the philosophy of Bresson,
and by extension, the philosophy of the film in question.
As a debut, Crime and
Punishment lacks much of the nuance and personality that would become
characteristic of Kaurismäki's later cinema; which would really come into its
own with the release of his third feature, Shadows in Paradise (1986). Subsequent
works would take a similar approach to the one seen here, incorporating the
same influence of Bresson and the milieu of socio-economic hardship as a
backdrop to a more conventional filmic narrative, but would punctuate the
deadpan humour and the mannered performance style with a sensitivity seemingly
plucked from the quiet melodramas of Yasujirō Ozu (note the appearance of the red
kettle in one of the screen captures featured above as an early nod to Ozu's cinema.)
Nonetheless, the film
still provides a fascinating insight into Kaurismäki's early approach, his creative
vision, and his particularly sardonic sense of ambition (a cavalier approach to
adapting literary classics that would eventually carry through to his later,
similarly modern and satirical adaptations of Shakespeare - Hamlet Goes
Business, 1987 - and Henri Murger - La Vie de Bohème, 1992 - respectively). Crime
and Punishment is a film very much worth experiencing, both in its own right, and
as a way of introducing the rough essence of what an Aki Kaurismäki film is before
approaching his subsequent, more interesting endeavours, such as those aforementioned.
