MOVIE REVIEW : Cinematic Drollery From Kaurismaki

Last year, the UCLA Film Archive introduced the droll and distinctive Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismaki to local audiences, and now the Nuart is presenting his “Ariel” (today through Nov. 13) and “Leningrad Cowboys Go America” (opening Nov. 14). The first is one of Kaurismaki’s best, and the second, although amusing, one of his slightest.

With “Ariel,” Kaurismaki typically pares down storytelling to bare-bone essentials to create a sense of darkly amusing absurdity that actually has more meaning than any number of more conventional films trying to find significance in the lives of marginal people. Turo Pajala plays a dark, lean 30-ish miner in the north of Finland whose odyssey commences when he is laid off. Heading south in a freshly inherited vintage white Cadillac convertible, he ends up seeking work at the docks of a large city, presumably Helsinki, and finding shelter in a hostel. In the course of his struggle for survival he meets a divorcee (Susanna Haavisto) with whom he begins a relationship. Inadvertently, he becomes caught up in a life of crime.

Neither Pajala nor Haavisto nor Matti Pellonpaa (Pajala’s eventual cellmate and friend) ever laugh--their bleak existences scarcely give them any occasion to--yet the twists and turns that fate deals these three frequently cause us to smile.

These are people who live hand-to-mouth in the most coldly impersonal of environments, yet Kaurismaki follows the course of their lives with one beautiful image after another. Kaurismaki resists all manner of social criticism, yet by the end of “Ariel” (Times-rated Mature for adult situations, language)--at which point the meaning of the film’s title becomes clear--we come away with feeling that for Kaurismaki all of Finland is a drab prison from which he aches to escape.

In a sense he accomplishes that escape in “Leningrad Cowboys Go America” (Times-rated Family), a whimsical but thin road movie that combines concert film and travelogue as we follow a Finnish band from the frozen tundra of their native country to a meandering tour of the seedy side of the South and across the border into Mexico.

Along the way, these naifs (whose manager is played by Pellonpaa) discover the wisdom of forsaking polkas for rock ‘n’ roll; however, they steadfastly keep their signature pointed shoes and matching hair style and their black suits, white shirts and dark ties. Kaurismaki’s choice of music--a mix of pop and rock--is crucial to “Ariel” and is here pretty much the whole show.

As in “Ariel” there any number of wry touches, and Kaurismaki reveals his hipness when, after arriving in New York, he has his Cowboys check into the Palace Hotel, a Bowery flophouse adjacent to the legendary CBGB club. And before you can say “Jim Jarmusch” in describing something of the aimless, affectless quality of this film, Jarmusch himself pops up as used car dealer you shouldn’t trust for a second.

“Ariel,” by the way, is preceded by the hilarious “Rocky VI,” in which Kaurismaki demolishes the pomposity of Sylvester Stallone’s “Rocky IV” in eight minutes flat.