Aki Kaurismäki: the greatest deadpan comedian alive
There are precisely two moments in Aki Kaurismäki’s romantic comedy Fallen Leaves in which the main character makes a definitive facial expression. Played by Alma Pöysti, Ansa is a grocery store clerk who meets and falls for a welder named Holappa, played by Jussi Vatanen. Both are struggling with work and loneliness. When she is fired for taking home out-of-date food items, she goes to work as a dishwasher and then a factory worker. When he is fired for drinking on the job, he ends up without work and living in social housing.
They are drawn together in quiet awkwardness – they don’t even find out each other’s names for most of the film – and their attraction is repeatedly thwarted by bad luck. Holappa loses Ansa’s number. He is passed out at a tram stop when she sees him. He waits for her at a movie theatre, only to leave moments before she arrives. He is hit by a train. In each interaction, the couple barely talks, their faces wooden, betraying no emotion. So on the one occasion when Ansa breaks out into a smile or, even more shocking, offers a quick, playful wink, it’s electrifying.
Such is the genius of Kaurismäki, a filmmaker who, for more than three decades, has been using the art of deadpan humour to not only evoke laughs but to conjure bursts of deep emotion when you least expect it. His form of comedy is so bone-dry that it makes the line delivery in the movies of Wes Anderson and Yorgos Lanthimos sound like they’re straight out of a Mel Brooks film. Since 1989’s Leningrad Cowboys Go America, the Finnish director has been delighting global audiences with his proprietary brand of humour, using unhurried pacing and visual contrast to provoke laughs and empathy for his downtrodden characters.
From the opening moments of his films, Kaurismäki lulls you into a languorous pace in which watching the machinations of labour, such as stacking glasses, stocking shelves, and standing at an assembly line, becomes riveting and meditative. The comedy is the same. The jokes – such as they are – develop in slowness, such as when a character opens the hood of a convertible only to sit rigidly, refusing to break eye contact with his observers, as its sluggish pace becomes more and more humiliating. With each inching second, the joke becomes funnier, a side-splitting example of the director’s punchline-free comedy.
Other jokes are dialogue-driven but equally languid in their development. During one scene in Fallen Leaves, Ansa and Holappa go to a movie theatre to inexplicably watch the woefully misjudged zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die, directed by fellow master of deadpan humour Jim Jarmusch. The couple sits stone-faced and awkward throughout the film. When they emerge onto the street and Holappa asks Ansa whether she enjoyed it, she says, with zero affectation, “I did. I’ve never laughed so much”.
Comedy is also found in Kaurismäki’s soundtracks, which he uses to devilish effect by dropping the needle on songs that directly clash with the characters’ circumstances. While the characters themselves betray almost no emotion, the soundtrack insults their private pain like a troll lurking in the comments section. During a scene in which a character is overwhelmed with heartbreak, a torch song will thunder over them. Instead of revealing their emotions with a correspondingly heartrending song, he exposes their private anguish with a contradictory piece of music and turns tragedy into comedy.
Kaurismäki even manages to out-cool directors like Lanthimos and Anderson on colour as well as humour. Using contrasting hues, he opts for a muted palette that evokes the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder rather than the candy-coloured extravaganza of an Anderson movie. Here again, he demonstrates playfulness and pathos, refusing to sugarcoat the grim lives of his characters but being equally unwilling to doom them to relentless gloom.
There have been many directors who have embraced deadpan humour over the years, but not since Buster Keaton has a filmmaker found so many inventive ways to convey it. From dialogue to pacing to music, Kaurismäki is the unrivalled master of using slow-rolled contrast to spur laughter. Crucially, however, he uses this style of humour to turn his self-described working-class “losers” into stoic heroes rather than punchlines.
