La Vie de Boheme

Aki Kaurismaki is the hottest filmmaker to emerge out of Finland. Granted, the competition isn't too stiff. Finland has infinitely more reindeer than directors, and the Finnish cinema has been pressed to average more than two films every five years.

Kaurismaki has raced past this national production average with such off-beat comedies as Leningrad Cowboys Go America and La Vie de Boheme. He has also become a favorite at film festivals and with
international critics. But one question remains: can Kaurismaki find an audience?

La Vie de Boheme may or may not answer that question. Its quirky narrative and meandering pace are engaging, but many of its joke are so elusive that the film practically requires footnotes.

Loosely based on the same novel that was the inspiration for Puccini's opera La Boheme, the film plays
as a set of insider gags on the French New Wave of the 1960s. The gritty black-and-white photography of La Vie de Boheme recalls Godard and Truffaut's early films. Kaurismaki's film has odd cameo appearances
bv such New Wave icons as Jean-Pierre Leaud (Truffaut's favorite actor) and director Louis Malle.  Even Sam Fuller — France's favorite American B-movie director — gets screen time.

But the spirit of La Vie de Boheme is closer to such "No-Wave" filmmakers as Jim Jarmusch. To put it bluntly, nothing much happens in La Vie de Boheme. That's part of the joke — and the viewer either clicks
with it or doesn't.

The three main characters of La Vie de  Boheme are would-be artists whose common bond is a lack of
money. Marcel is the author of a 21-act play that no one wants to produce. Rodolfo is a sour-faced Albanian painter whose work resembles German Expressionism on a bad day. Schaunard is an avant-garde composer whose orchestrations involve police sirens, bull horns and the random banging of piano keys.

Not surprisingly, they are appreciated only by the women who fall in love with them. And even that doesn't
last for long.

Added to this state of artistic alienation is the mish-mash of the film's soundtrack — a crazed mix of French and Finnish that occasionally even seems to baffle the characters.

La Vie de Boheme is kinda slow, sorta funny and truly off-beat. You have to be in the mood for it, however — whatever that mood may be. Like its characters, the film is part pose and part talent.