Written and directed by Aki Kaurismäki
Economic anxiety is a laughing matter in Aki Kaurismäki’s Drifting Clouds, the story of a couple who falls on hard times and keeps falling in their attempts to lift themselves up by their bootstraps. Turns out there’s no such thing, and more often than not, malicious social mechanisms will do their best to step on those already lying down.
Today, Kaurismäki’s native Finland knows a thing or two about taking care of those in need but they don’t make a big deal out of it. The country also consistently scores high on any social performance index you can think of, and if its people had just a shred of interest in talking to the world about themselves, we’d likely never hear the end of it.
The early 90s were a different matter, as Finland went through a deep depression where unemployment rose to almost 20% and it’s where Drifting Clouds takes its course. Kati Outinen is Ilona, head waitress at an upscale restaurant that shuts its doors and Kari Väänänen plays her partner Lauri who drives a tramcar and soon finds himself unemployed as well.
Lauri, for his own reasons, refuses handouts, and so they try to stay above water in increasingly risky ways, bringing them into contact with all those who prey upon the desperate, be it crooked employment agents, criminals, or bankers. Things worsen, furniture gets repoed, food runs low, and soon there’s only the wallpaper left to eat. What’s so funny about that? Well…
Woe is writ large across Drifting Clouds, but Kaurismäki, in his trademark style, portrays these dire straits with a darkly comic deadpan manner. Some scenes are ludicrous on the surface (the decision as to which tramcar driver will lose their job happens via a card draw) and some are funny in how they’re portrayed (knife fights, fist fights, extortion happens without a twitch of the lip).
When characters finally want to spend breath on a compound sentence, you’ll be stunned by the wit contained in each line, like when an out-of-work bouncer excoriates society for no longer needing doormen despite kids being worse than ever with their vomiting ways and torn jeans, or when a former colleague of Ilona is so in the grips of alcoholism he needs to pour vodka into the small beer he can still afford.
Drifting Clouds is not a scathing critique of bad actors or political failings. The closest thing it comes to commentary on institutional behavior is when Ilona applies for a business loan and the banker in charge takes a very conservative line on her suitability as a borrower, which might even seem prudent in light of the real-life depression in part being caused by a deregulated banking sector which had to be reigned in.
Had Kaurismäki given into overt critique, Drifting Clouds would stray from its comedic ethos, because it’s a situational comedy at heart. These situations, on paper tragic, attain a comedic distance through Kaurismäki’s deadpan direction, because the lack of emotion involved also strips it of a moral coloring.
It also empowers the individual, strangely enough, and Ilona and Lauri’s matter-of-factness in face of the precarious situation they’re in makes me think of people who have undergone severe hardships have been exploited, but still hold their heads high because they feel they’ve never surrendered their dignity. Your circumstances don’t define you if you don’t let them.
It’s in this sense of dignity that Drifting Clouds reveals its humanitarian outlook where Ilona and Lauri are not to be judged by their circumstances but their resolute support of each other and resourcefulness in pushing on. We say comedy is tragedy + time, and when you combine this belief with the creed of this too shall pass, you get Drifting Clouds, a comedic rendering of tragic circumstances from a visionary director with a sensibility entirely his own.
Mikkel Frederiksen 