Introduction: Where do people go in the face of social pressure and fate.
The film "Floating Clouds" is the first in Finnish director Aki Kolysmaki's "Trilogy of Contemporary Finland", three films intended to explore the question of "where people are going in the face of social pressures and fate", a series of films that have won many awards at international film festivals. "Floating Clouds" was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the 49th Cannes International Film Festival and the Catholic Humanitarian Award.
The film tells the story of a couple who are forced to lose their jobs in the context of the Great Depression, continue to find jobs in various places in order to survive, support each other and constantly run into walls, and finally open a restaurant of their own with the help of their former boss. The film shows us the mutual support and mutual comfort between the low-level couple of Yi Lola and Laurie, and shows the director's humanistic care for the laid-off workers in Finnish cities.
Director Aki Kaurismäki is a Finnish heavyweight director, writer and producer, one of the few internationally acclaimed Finnish directors, his films have a strong personal style, he is good at using omissions, compared with Woody Allen's "talking films" in his films is simply "pitiful", and the connection between the pictures also seems to be "contradictory" with the smooth narrative of mainstream Hollywood - the camera has a high sense of existence in his films, not really appearing in the camera but through some less coherent time and space "jump cut" And the actor's special performance style and positioning, forming a kind of "Brecht separation effect" that appears in the drama.
In addition, the director's personal style is also expressed in some preferences for film settings, such as flowers, dogs, taverns and band performances, which have been traced in many of the director's films. His strong personal style can make the audience recognize his work as soon as he sees it, and his films carry the rare "author's film" style of the moment, he has repeatedly expressed his disdain for Hollywood films, and he is eager to return to the era of art film masters in the 1950s and 1960s, which is inseparable from his early personal experience.
His education experience was not smooth, he did not go to a professional film school, and the reason why he was rejected by the Finnish Film Academy was too "cynical", and then he dropped out of school and taught himself film at the Munich Film Museum, and came into contact with the works of many film masters such as Fassbinder, Yasujiro Ozu, Godard, etc., and became a film critic. After that, he founded a film company with his brother and began to devote himself to film creation, and it is easy to see the shadow of the film masters of the fifties and sixties from his works.
Clean dialogue and camera footage are a feature of Aki Kaurismäki's films, which don't have a single superfluous line or a lengthy picture, which is one of the reasons why most of his films are around 90 minutes or even shorter. Every line drives the plot and every shot has an irreplaceable narrative or atmospheric rendering function, and the characters in the film, like the Finns in the impression, never move their mouths about things that can be solved with their fists.
The opening chapter is very interesting to describe the process of the alcoholic chef "playing drunk" in the back kitchen after getting drunk - the chef took a knife and rushed into the kitchen of Yi Luo and the concierge, the concierge approached the chef in a menacing manner, the concierge dragged the stabbed hand back two steps, Yi Lola approached the chef, holding the bottle and knife aside, the cook staggered and sat on the stool, and Yi Lola changed clothes for the concierge and simply bandaged the wound.
The whole process only has the last Lola to say to the kitchen "go to the doctor", accompanied by light and witty music, this clip gives people the feeling of watching a silent film, and the director also deliberately omits the bloody fight shot, under the fixed panoramic lens, allowing the actors to walk in the picture without showing the full picture of the matter, and the limited "third person perspective" gives the audience more space for association. Under such a fixed panoramic lens, it is not difficult to see the shadow of Yasujiro Ozu.
The actress Yrolla's actor, Katie Otinen, is also far from the way we see it in the film, and the director is influenced by Brecht's plays, who believe that the actor is higher than the character and becomes the narrator of the story. In "Floating Clouds", we can see that her role as Yi Lola has little expression on her face, and the screen roles that Katie Otinen and Aki Kaurismäki have worked on for more than thirty years are mostly such "expressionless performances", which is undoubtedly the result of the director's manipulation.
He strictly forbade the actor to shout and laugh in his films, even to control the line of sight of his eyes, and it seemed that he did not need too much performance to show the character, so that the audience could be more convinced of the authenticity of her performance in the film, so that her unobtrusive appearance produced a unique "Finnish beauty". Most of the other characters besides her also have such expressions, or have exaggerated body performances like alcoholic chefs, giving people the feeling of watching a stage play.
The omitted lines, Beyond Mune's performances are scenes that often recur in the narrative—flowers, puppies, taverns, and bands—and some say that Aki Kaurismäki's films always seem to tell a story because they don't seem to be absent from his films. In "Floating Clouds", the male protagonist Laurie returns home in any state, always holding a bouquet of flowers in his hand, which seems to be the romantic background under his dull appearance, and the flowers become the witnesses of the love between the two. And the puppies, taverns and bands are never absent in either "The Story of the Floating Clouds" or "The Man Without a Past.".
There is a Finnish proverb called "Jos ei viina, sauna ja terva auta, niin tauti on kuolemaksi" (if spirits, saunas and tar are not cured, it means that it is terminally ill), which shows that Finland's alcohol obsession has a long history. Music has always been the preference of Aki Kaurismäki, in his films music not only appears in the soundtrack, but also in the narrative, the beginning of the film is a piano song in the restaurant, and the restaurant band that appears many times later, making most of the film's music become an ambient sound, strengthening the connection between music and the picture, and the choice of music is closely related to the specific inner state of the characters in the film at that time, and his skillful treatment of the film sound and painting creates a stronger emotional rendering force for the film.
The Finnish economy in the 90s was not optimistic, after the rapid development of the 80s, the growth of world trade in the early 90s entered a stagnant era, people like the economic boom to the banks of a large number of loans, overdraft consumption, resulting in a large accumulation of public debt, thus endangering the financial market, and layoffs, unemployment and endless situation, which makes the Finnish economy in this period in a downturn.
The film also exposes the difficulties of the workers who were struggling for life in Finland at that time through the phenomenon of loan television, loan sofas, bank failures, etc., through the depiction of the lives of these low-level workers and working class people, to reflect the dark places and problems in the society at that time, the core of Aki Korismaki's films, and the "perfect ending" at the end is also the embodiment of the ideal pursuit of life by these little people, and it is also the embodiment of the humanistic care after the director poured his feelings into them.