Roughly fifteen Franks and one Pekka (Markku Toikka) want to escape their back-breaking living conditions in the working-class neighbourhood of Kallio and based on their parents’ stories decide to head towards the fabled district of Eira. People say it’s a utopia: the air is fresher, the grass is greener. The journey becomes a peculiar military expedition through Helsinki’s key cultural locations (Club Tavastia, the Finnish Film Archive’s theatre Orion) as the Franks keep dropping out one after another. One finds love, another hangs himself, a third gets shot by a woman, the fourth dies on the soda-stained floor of a fast-food joint, all of them ultimately meeting their inevitable fate.
Aki Kaurismäki’s genre hybrid is a kind of classic in spite of itself: beginning with the last supper and morphing into a portrait of a generational class struggle, a teen film pushing middle age, a communist fanifesto, a desperate parody, a delusional comedy, a basement-dweller escape fantasy with Western sensibilities, a banana-peel film noir, a road movie trundling along in comfy slippers and a Blues Brothers scored by Finnish rock band Popeda. The cornered rats of the proletariat crawl towards their bourgeois ideal, dodging hunger and death colliding with the poetry of Jacques Prévert. Kaurismäki’s lofty, twenty-fold self-portrait cheapo evolves into a battle cry, stifled in the throat before its time.
Lauri Timonen