We took a few days off to recuperate from "Fuck you, Tarantino!" Week, and now we're back with some Finnish weirdness. If Beckett would have directed a heist film, Arvottomat might be what it would have looked like. Mika Kaurismäki is crazy, and it shows in his films. When L&S pointed out that Arvottomat was made in 1982, I went "nuh uh...". It's not that the music and the clothing doesn't scream 80's. There's just something about this film that made me think the date was a typo. Maybe he was ahead of his time, or maybe I'm really tired...
From Lana Wilson at Senses of Cinema:
[...]In their youth, the Kaurismäki brothers were insatiable cinéphiles and watched five or six films every day at the Finnish Film Archive, where they especially admired Jean-Luc Godard, Yasujiro Ozu and American film noir. (9) Mika studied film in Munich, but Aki was rejected by the Finnish film school “because he was considered to be too cynical” (10). Aki began a media studies program at the University of Tampere, but soon quit “to work ‘in real life,’ taking ‘honest jobs’ such as postman and dishwasher” (11). In 1980, the brothers created their own film company, Villealfa, named for Godard’s Alphaville: une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965), and began rapidly making films together.
Generally, Aki wrote the screenplay and Mika directed; this was the case for two of their early efforts, Valehtelija (The Liar, 1981) and Arvottomat (The Worthless, 1982), in which Aki also starred. In between these two films, the brothers co-directed a rock documentary, Saimaa-ilmiö (The Saimaa Gesture, 1981), and soon after they would make two more feature films together: Klaani: Tarina Sammakoitten suvusta (The Clan Tale of Frogs, 1984) and Rosso (1985). Mika is generally regarded as a very good director, with the ability to work in a variety of genres and a strong sense of classical Hollywood storytelling; Aki, whose later solo work is notable for its clever takes on popular genres and riffs on Hollywood conventions, clearly learned a lot from his brother, but then aimed his ideas toward less commercial ends.
The films the Kaurismäki brothers made together in the early 1980s gave a terrific burst of revitalization to the floundering Finnish film industry – since that decade began, the Kaurismäki brothers have been responsible for an astonishing twenty percent of all Finnish films. (12) Although Mika continued making successful films throughout the rest of the 1980s and into the present, it was when Aki began to direct his own scripts that he had the chance to hone the remarkably original style that would soon draw international attention.
Technical Information:
Title: Arvottomat/The Worthless
Year: 1982
Country: Finland
Director: Mika Kaurismäki
Source: Retail DVD9
DVD Format: PAL
Container: .iso+mds
Size: 6.24 GB
Length: 1:52:38
Programs used: Unknown
Resolution: 720x576
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Video: MPEG2 @ ~5800 kb/s
Frame Rate: 25 fps
Audio: Suomi- Dolby AC3 Stereo @ 192 Kbps
Subtitles: Dansk, Svenska, Norsk, Suomi, English
Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched
DVD Extras: Trailer, "About the Worthless", Interview, Photo Gallery, Mika Kaurismäki Biography
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