Juhani Aho's 1901 novel JUHA is a classic of Finnish literature, a dismal view of Nordic life over a century ago when life in the country was poor and brutal. Crippled farmer Juha lives with his lovely young wife Marja and the two manage their planted vegetables and livestock. The rich and seductive Shmeikka happens to drop by, and he manages to convince Marja to leave her husband for a better life in the big city. To Marja's horror, Shmeikka proves to be a pimp who imprisons her in a brothel. Meanwhile Juha, feeling humiliated, plans his revenge.
Aho's novel had been adapted for stage and film on a few occasions before, but Aki Kaurismäki's 1999 film offers a fresh take. Kaurismäki chose to shoot it in black-and-white as a silent film, with the minimal dialogue necessary to get the plot being shown as intertitles. But Kaurismäki's film is also, like all of his work, a black comedy. Sure, at the climax he depicts the events as a straightforward drama, but elsewhere the shots are imbued with a subtle humour. By this point in his career, Kaurismäki had established a set of stock elements from which he assembled his films: deadpan faces (Kati Outinen as Marja hardly moves the lower portion of her face, doing everything with her eyes), a mismatch between a modern setting and antique appliances or class struggle, and bands on stage performing some antiquated rock or Finnish tango genre. Shmeikka (French actor Andre Wilms, in the third of his collaborations with the Finnish auteur) is such a stock 19th-century villain that his mere presence in this modern-day setting elicits laughter. And the setting that Kaurismäki has chosen for the ending, which I won't spoil here, is a laugh-out-loud example of his depiction of Helsinki.
Kaurismäki also likes to play up the features of silent films that nowadays seem silly to us: in an early scene in the village tavern, Juha (Sakari Kuosmanen) laughs wildly and slaps his hands on his knees, the kind of overacting typical of the silent era. Just as silent films had musical accompaniment that seems kind of insubstantial and lightweight, here Kaurismäki has commissioned a score that is pure muzak.
The humour may be too subtle to get for viewers who aren't already attuned to this director's sui generis style. A film like "Drifting Clouds" or his so-called Proletariat Trilogy might be a better introduction to Kaurismäki. Also, JUHA feels somewhat slight compared to some of his other films, and black-and-white photography has never been his forte. Still, I enjoyed this film as part of a chronological journey through Kaurismäki's output.
