Aki Kaurismäki | La Vie de Bohème (The Bohemian Life) / 1992

the influence of blue on art

by Douglas Messerli

 

Aki Kaurismäki (screenplay, based on the fiction by Henri Murger), Aki Kaurismäki (director) La Vie de Bohème (The Bohemian Life) / 1992

 

Aki Kaurismäki's La Vie de Bohème has often been described by critics as a rather dour version of the Henri Murger novel which, in turn, inspired Puccini's La Bohème. And I suppose, given the doleful looks of Matti Pellonpää, playing this film's Rodolfo, the lean grizzled appearance of André Wilms as Marcel, and the long-haired, chain-smoking  down-and-out composer Schaunard (Kari Väänänen) that one might be tempted to imagine that the film's characters have none of the joie de vie of the original.

      Although he first wanted to film in Helsinki,  Kaurismäki soon became convinced that there was no other place in which La Vie de Bohème could exist but in Paris. The streets in this "city of light," however, seem so deserted and covered with debris that it might as well have been shot in a Helsinki suburb. Although the Eiffel Tower appears in a couple of scenes, it has none of the glitter—this is, after all, a gritty black and white work—that the lacy iron symbol has in other films. Although seasons come and go, this La Vie de Bohème is played in an eternal winter.  Kaurismäki's Paris, in short, is a desolate spot.

     And why wouldn't it be if you had your 21-act play was rejected simply because you had refused to cut even a semicolon? Or if you composed music—vaguely influenced by the what the composer suggests is the effect of "blue on art" and your newest sonata is entitled Traffic Jam—to which even your friends cannot bear to listen? Or, as in Rodolfo's case, if you were an Albanian in Paris without any legal papers? The moment Rodolfo meets his Mimi (Evelyne Didi) he is arrested and sent back to Albania. And, as in the original, none of them have money to pay the rent!

     Yet it is the Murger's and Puccini's versions, as romantic as they are, that might truly be described as bleak. These three untalented artists somehow get along quite amusingly, while their stone-faced commentaries spoken in French by Finnish actors, making the lines seem even more "artificial," often result in a laughter that does not come in roars but through continuous chortles from the audience.

      Despite their down-and-out lives, they do reap some financial windfalls. Marcel is hired by a short-fused publisher (played by American director Sam Fuller) to edit his magazine, Girdle of Eris. Rodolfo is commissioned to do a portrait by a wealthy man (Jean-Pierre Leaud). But the moment that any money enters their hands, they quickly share it, buying up provisions, liquor, and other consumer  goods—even a ridiculous Mathis, a tri-tired car manufactured in France in 1946. When they have money, their girls, Musette and Mimi, share their lives; when Rodolfo is deported and Marcel fired for printing his terrible play in the magazine, the women predictably disappear from their sides.   

 

    Although Mimi may be tubercular, Kaurismäki does not at all sentimentalize her, and she rarely coughs. She is simply another poor victim of the street, forced at times to wander on snowy nights. When fired from his job, Marcel summarizes one of the themes of this film and what might characterize several of Kaurismäki's somewhat eccentric achievements: "We make child's play of it all misfortunes. We don't get depressed."

     When Rudolfo sneaks back into France, Mimi drops her current boyfriend, and the men each contribute a few coins in order to buy enough food for a moderate feast. The artist sells what is left of his paintings to his patron. As Mimi grows ill, the men gather about her bed, but she sends them off, dying in an almost uneventful manner, the way most of us draw our last breath.

       Kaurismäki's Bohemians are the true artists, often so untalented that they cannot sell or share their work, but so impassioned about their art, or just stubbornly determined to create it, that they survive. They are fools, clearly, clowns in a society that seldom has room for their existence or a desire for what they might produce. It is not just Schaunard's music, but their entire lives that might be said to demonstrate "The Influence of Blue on Art."

    

Los Angeles, December 10, 2011

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2011).