Clouds pass by

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Movie
German title Clouds pass by
Original title Kauas pilvet karkaavat
Country of production Finland , Germany , France
original language Finnish
Publishing year 1996
length 96 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Aki Kaurismäki
script Aki Kaurismäki
production Erkki Astala,
Aki Kaurismäki
music Shelley Fisher
camera Timo Salminen
cut Aki Kaurismäki
occupation
chronology

Successor  →
The man without a past

Clouds are passing by (original title: Kauas pilvet karkaavat) is a film by the Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki , which addresses unemployment. It forms the first part of Kaurismäki's Finland trilogy , which the director continued in 2002 with The Man Without a Past and 2006 with Lights of the Suburbs .

action

Ilona works as a head waitress in the restaurant "Dubrovnik", her husband Lauri as a tram driver. Both lose their jobs one after the other: Lauri because the transport company is being restructured and some of the employees are being laid off, Ilona because the restaurant "Dubrovnik" goes bankrupt. Both find it difficult to get a new job: Ilona is attested that at 38 she is too old to work in the restaurant business; at Lauri's health problems lead to the loss of his driver's license, so that he is not able to do the job as a coach driver. The former bouncer of the Dubrovnik, Melartin, finally gives Ilona the idea of ​​opening a restaurant himself. The bank does not provide a loan for this, but Ms. Sjöholm, the former owner of the Dubrovnik, offers to help. Ilona and Lauri rent rooms, employ the former staff of Dubrovnik as employees and open the restaurant under the name 'Arbeit' (Finnish: "Ravintola työ"). After a tough initial phase, things seem to be going well.

classification

As in the other parts of his Finland trilogy ("Suomi-trilogia"), Kaurismäki describes the life of the 'little man' who gets into trouble: Lauri and Ilona don't have a lot of money. Lauri was just buying a TV in installments when she hits unemployment. The film was made at a time when Finland lost important trading partners after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, was stuck in a severe economic crisis and the unemployment figures soared. Aki Kaurismäki: Somebody has to tell you what mess people are in and how they still maintain their dignity. I myself come from a poor background and I know how society treats these people. Why should I make a film about spoiled mothers' boys who only have one problem: finding the right outfit to show off.

dedication

The film is dedicated to the memory of the Finnish actor Matti Pellonpää , who should have played the male lead. After his death in 1995 Aki Kaurismäki cast the second leading role with Kari Väänänen . In addition to the dedication at the beginning of the film, Pellonpää appears a second time: The picture of the deceased child of Ilona and Lauri on the living room shelf shows Matti as a child.

Reviews

  • Aki Kaurismäki describes the sudden social decline of two 'normal citizens' in the usual laconic manner. "Clouds are passing by" in Cinema
  • With incomparable conciseness, Kaurismäki creates this dreariness that turns comic again and again. (...) Again a wonderfully simple and dryly funny ode to the little heroes. "Clouds pass by" on filmtabs.de
  • In the Kaurismäki country of the 1990s, capitalism raged, (...) turned the city's most renowned restaurant into a branch of a fast food chain, the solid head waitress into an illegal dishwasher and the proud tram driver into an unemployed alcoholic without a driver's license. (...) The chief melancholic of European auteur cinemas, on the other hand, does his best to tell the story, which screams with injustice, in the quietest possible tones: in ascetically composed tableaux, he lets lonely figures wander around in front of oversized areas of color and stare silently through shop windows into warm interiors She is accompanied by cameraman Salminen in shots as long as the Finnish winter, as rigid as the faces of the eternal losers, objectively observing and, for all the subtle emotions, prefers to rely on melancholic tango sounds rather than clarifying dialogue or even expressive drama. "As long as you can" by Eleonóra Szemerey on schnitt.de

Prices

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ "Success Model Finland" , Hamburger Abendblatt from October 26, 2008
  2. ↑ "Work and Unemployment in Films by Aki Kaurismäki" ( Memento of the original from January 15, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. by Elvira Plitt on kinokarate.de  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.kinokarate.de
  3. ↑ "Kauas pilvet karkaavat" 2004 by Kari Glödstaf on filmgoer.fi