Who payed the critics

Perfectly adorable

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Imagine a Finnish director making a film that's as much a tribute to French film as a parody of its worst excesses, and you have a fair idea of what La Vie de Boheme is about. Aki Kaurismaki uses his thoroughly deadpan comic approach to render the lives of a group of pathetic artists in France, none of whom are even close to being artists (except in their own minds). In fact, it's easy for the uninitiated to take the film very seriously, given Kaurismaki's dry comic touch. I caught this at the SF International Film Festival, where a fair part of the audience (including myself) was caught up in laughter - while admiring the painterly black and white photography and perfectly pitched performances. Those uncomfortable with a Jim jarmusch style of post- modernism might even feel lost from time to time. But all of Kaurismaki's film's are comedies, some more outrageous than others, and this one is about as perfect in conception as you might hope.

Aki Kaurismaki is one of the most important modern directors. He manages to make a movie out of nothing just like, say, Mike Leigh. And his characters are simply every-day people, whom he manages to transform into convincible movie heroes or, most likely, antiheroes.This movie is not different: it is very sad and also joyous at the same time. It treats a very serious subjects (pourness, loneliness, desperation) without being pathetic or overblown and it makes, in the most beautiful way, a strong connection between the characters and the viewer.Marvellous acting and genious direction makes this movie another Kaurismaki's little/big masterpiece.

Although Aki Kaurismaki credits Henri Murger's collection of stories as the source for his "La vie de boheme" (1992), the underlying dramatic structure actually comes straight from Puccini's opera "La boheme" (with the central focus of the story of Rodolphe and Mimi). Superb black and white photography, with a droll script delivered by mostly dead-pan (but nonetheless funny) performers -- including beloved regulars like the late Matti Pellonpaa and Kari Vaananen (Kati Outinen, a very appropriate Mimi I would think, was missing, however -- maybe her French was not good enough).

A French playwright, an Albanian painter, and an Irish composer, all living hand-to-mouth in Paris, devise various schemes to secure their next meal, or cheat the landlord, or help each other out of jams. Cynically witty and poignant by turns, La Vie de Boheme somehow manages to simultaneously embellish and skewer the old cliche about starving artists on the Left Bank. This might almost be the film to show your son or daughter when they have declared that they want to become a novelist or painter and move to an exotic locale--except that, who knows, it might have the opposite of the intended effect.I liked it quite a bit. Watch for the performance by the Irishman of his own piano piece for his friends, toward the end: hilarious!