You get to Helsinki by train. Then you get beaten in a park by some criminals. You eventually wake up in a hospital, having lost your memory and remembering nothing of your life. Nobody is there to help you. This is the plot of one of Aki Kaurismäki’s masterpieces, “The Man Without a Past”. Shot in 2002 in Finland, this movie is a clever portrayal of life in the lowest social classes at the boundaries of a big city.
The main character, who doesn’t even remember his own name, feels completely alone and neglected from society. People are cold, nearly nobody is interested in his fate. Only a poor man, with no money to feed himself and his own family, will help him. The protagonist starts to live in a container, and, despite being constantly harassed by a violent guard, he gradually begins to feel at home in the misery surrounding him.
What strikes the most in this movie is that in a wealthy country like Finland people can still live in such a grinding poverty. Misery is present everywhere, but in rich countries it is often ignored, making it even a worse matter.
Kaurismäki successfully depicts life at the boundaries of a wealthy city like Helsinki. He shows us a new face of poverty: these people, excluded from society, are still more human and willing to help than regular people. They have almost no money for themselves, but they do not hesitate to give food and offer a shelter for people in need of help. How many wealthy people would do that?
Kaurismäki’s characters are always poor marginalized people, with nothing left to live for. They are often on the edge of suicide and willing to die. But eventually they always find a reason to go on living. In this film the protagonist finds love and true friends among the miserable people living in the outskirts of Helsinki. He is given the chance to go back to his old life, to live again in a decent house, but he refuses. That life doesn’t belong to him anymore. He wants to stay with his new friends, and sing and dance at night at a fire camp. They haven’t got any money, but they are happier than us. That’s the lesson we learn: while we strive for money and ephemeral success, often hating each other, they dance.
Living Europe 
Modern Rousseau..with all its failures of living the reality.
Thanks for stopping by and liking our blog. That gave me a chance to visit yours and read this review which resonated with me. There are many ways to measure wealth besides money and success. Looking forward to reading more of your posts. Anita @ No Particular Place To Go
Thanks for reading our post, we hope to have you back here soon 😀
“You are not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your f***ing khakis. You’re the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.”
“It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.”
(“Fight Club”, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0137523/)
Thank you for visiting my blog, so that I got a chance to find yours. I found your blog very intresting!
Even though I see the film as a master piece of author Kaurismäki, I’d remind Kaurismäki is a kind of a romanticist what comes to the genre of all his films. I love the way he can detail the most valuable things in life (the things you can’t buy with money) like friendship, company and solidarity.
Still it’s not a real Helsinki, it’s fictional Helsinki and a fictional world of poverty in the movie. Not that you’d have maintained/written so here! Sometimes I just have to remind my foreign friends that I don’t live in Kaurismäki-land, I live in Finland in which we have more brutal and rude problems and issues with poverty, misery, homelessness and social welfare politics than in the films of Aki Kaurismäkis.
This film has also a special place in my heart, because I had my second internship in the film industry and a first internship as a lightning trainee in this production (The Man Without A Past). After the production I worked several years in the Finnish film industry as an electrician/lightning technician and as a camera assistant. So I delighted read about it from your point of view.
Thank you, kiitos!
Thank you for your comment! Your point of view is very interesting. I’ve been more than once in Helsinki and I’m completely aware that it is not the city depicted by Kaurismäki; I’m sorry if it wasn’t clear in the post.
Anyway, considering that you work in the film industry, could you suggest us a couple of Finnish films worth seeing? 🙂
“Misery is present everywhere, but in rich countries it is often ignored, making it even a worse matter” by writing this, you pointed your awareness of the difference between real and fictional Helsinki.
What I commented former was more like remind to those people who has only seen the fictional Finland created by author Kaurismäki.
About Finnish films: I’ d like to recommend the films of Klaus Härö e.g. “Äideistä parhain” (Mother of Mine) and “Den nya Människan”. What it comes to documentary films, definitely worth of watching is “Sydämeni taakka” (Burden of my Heart) directed by Iris Olsson. The subject of Olssons film is tough but her talent to deal with it is amazing and hopeful.
Perhaps you’d also like to see an entertaining and touching documentary film about Finnish sauna culture? Then give a chance to “Miesten vuoro” (Steam of Life) directed by Joonas Berghäll and Mika Hotakainen.
I hope you’ll enjoy some of these films at least! 🙂
Thank you very much for the suggestions! I’ll definitely look for those movies 🙂