Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Ariel
1988 · Aki Kaurismäki · Ariel on Sightlines
The roof will not close. Taisto Kasurinen inherits a white American convertible, points it south out of the mining country, and drives to Helsinki with the Finnish sky sitting directly on his head. Somewhere else that car is freedom. Here it is a cold seat with the weather in it.
He gets the keys in a café. The pit has shut. His father pushes them across the table, says his few words, and walks into the washroom. Kaurismäki does not film what happens in there. We get the gesture, then the aftermath, and the event that should join them has been cut out.
That missing piece is the whole method, and it is why Deleuze is worth having in the next seat.
Deleuze splits cinema in two. In the movement-image, a person perceives a situation and acts to change it; the act works; the editing exists to keep that chain tight. That is most films ever made. His finest name for the version Kaurismäki is quoting is the small form: an act discloses a situation you couldn't otherwise see. A gesture points offscreen. Deleuze calls such a gesture an index, and when it implies a situation the film never delivers, an index of lack.
Ariel is full of indexes with nothing behind them. Keys slide across a table and a man dies out of frame. The savings are simply gone. Taisto goes to prison for violence he did not fully choose. In a Melville picture, which is where this film borrowed its trench coats and its silence, the ritual gesture opens the world up. Here the gestures keep their shape and lose their function.
Deleuze found that jam in Italy after the war and called it the crisis of the action-image: characters who can no longer react adequately to what they perceive, scenes joined by slackened links, the plot replaced by the trip that transforms nothing. Ariel's route is mine, road, city, casual labour, prison, harbour. Each segment opens abruptly and closes before it can accumulate into a cause. Taisto is in motion for seventy-odd minutes and alters nothing. He isn't a hero with a flaw. He's a man the labour market is moving.
Why bother with the vocabulary? Because without it you say "minimalism" and stop. The vocabulary tells you which parts are missing and what those parts were for. Kaurismäki hasn't trimmed a style. He has deleted the connective tissue that lets action work — establishing beats, reaction shots, explanatory coverage — while keeping the genres that depend on it. The friction between the retained skeleton and the removed circuit is where the comedy lives, and the grief too.
Then there is the face. Deleuze defines the affection-image as feeling registered but not yet discharged into action: normally a held beat before somebody moves. Kaurismäki keeps an entire film there. Turo Pajala takes the mine, the father, the robbery, and spends none of it. One quality, endurance, held at the same level from first frame to last: Deleuze's word for that immobile reflecting face is the qualisign. The debt is exact and it is Pickpocket. Bresson drained his models' faces and moved the feeling into hands, objects, the precise motion of a transaction; Bazin defended that refusal of psychology when others called it cold. Kaurismäki carries it north and discovers something Bresson never wanted: held long enough against events this extreme, flatness is funny. Nobody tells a joke. The withholding is the joke.
The feeling still has to go somewhere, and it goes into two places. Colour first. Salminen pools deep blues, reds and greens into rooms whose inhabitants could never have chosen them — Sirk's logic from All That Heaven Allows, where saturated hue carries what a repressed surface won't say. Deleuze's colour-image is exactly this: colour that absorbs the scene and its emotion instead of describing it. Then music. Tango, schlager, rockabilly, the jukebox. The soundtrack is the film's licensed sentiment, large because everything visible is kept small, and it finishes on "Over the Rainbow" in Finnish as the freighter pulls out.
The bodies carry the rest. Salminen's frontal, eye-level, planimetric setups come from Ozu, and what they produce is what Deleuze calls the gest: a posture that exposes a social relation rather than a psychology. These people stand and sit like workers who have learned that demonstration costs money. The deadpan is a class posture before it's a style.
The shape underneath is naturalism's line of slope, the irreversible slide toward ruin. Deleuze found that slope powered by appetite and compulsion. Kaurismäki's is powered by a mine closing. No drive, no degradation, just arithmetic.
So what did it do? It proved that melodrama's entire inventory — unemployment, a suicide, a stolen inheritance, a single mother, a wrongful sentence, a flight by sea — can be run at absolute zero and land harder than when it's played. The viewer supplies everything the surface withholds, which means the viewer has to be there, working. And then Kaurismäki does the thing nobody else would risk. After an hour of withdrawing the power to act, he hands his man an act anyway: a prison break staged matter-of-factly, a boat, Mexico. Le Quai des brumes gave French poetic realism its doomed couple and its dream of escape from a dead-end port, and that boat is a trap. This one leaves. The rainbow song tells you the hope is borrowed from Hollywood, secondhand, the wrong size for Finland like the convertible with the broken roof — the film's one true symbol, absurdity and aspiration and bad luck folded into a single object. Kaurismäki doesn't wink and doesn't undercut. He lets the hope be borrowed and meant at once, and declines to say which weighs more.
It seeded his own country first: Shadows in Paradise before it, The Match Factory Girl after, the saturated palette and Pellonpää's hangdog face hardening into a signature that a generation of deadpan art cinema would learn from, and that English-speaking viewers finally met when Criterion boxed the three films together.
Watch it again and watch the camera at the worst moments. It does nothing. It stays where it is. Then notice how much you feel anyway, and whose feeling that actually is.
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — Taisto perceives every catastrophe (mine closure, father's suicide, robbery, prison) and can mount no adequate response; the dossier's 'man to whom things happen and who meets them with unbroken understatement'
- voyage / balade form — the episodic itinerary — mine to road to city to workplace to prison to escape to harbor — each segment 'introduced abruptly and closed just as fast,' with the journey transforming nothing
- weak links — Kaurismäki 'removes the connective tissue': establishing beats, reaction shots and explanatory coverage stripped so consequences arrive abruptly and time compresses without warning
- index of lack — the father slides the car keys across the café table and the suicide in the washroom is elided rather than dramatized — the gesture stands in for a situation the film never shows
- action-image, small form — the film borrows Melville's ritualized crime grammar from Le Samouraï — taciturn men, gesture as code — while refusing to let those gestures disclose the situation they normally would
- affection-image — grief, love and fear 'indicated by the smallest of adjustments rather than dramatized' — feeling registered on the face and never discharged into action
- qualisign (icon of quality) — Turo Pajala's Taisto as 'a study in stoic endurance' — one immobile face sustaining a single quality across the entire film, the Bressonian model technique from Pickpocket
- affective colour — Salminen's 'deep blues, reds, and greens pooling in otherwise drab interiors,' Sirk's saturated-colour emotional register from All That Heaven Allows applied to working-class rooms
- the gest — frontal, eye-level tableau staging descended from Ozu's Tokyo Story: bodies arranged flatly, moving little, so posture itself exposes a class relation rather than a psychology
- cinema of the body (attitudes and postures) — 'actors arranged frontally, often held at a slight remove, moving little and speaking less'; static held shots let the everyday working body carry the film's duration
- the seer (voyant) — Taisto endures rather than acts — robbed, jailed for 'violence he did not fully choose' — watching his own life happen until the film grants him a final act
- line of slope (entropy / degradation) — the structure is 'a picaresque of downward mobility': pit closes, father dies, savings stolen, prison — an irreversible slide, driven by economics rather than appetite
- symbol — the white convertible whose roof will not close — 'a fool's chariot of freedom,' Americana wrong for the climate, condensing absurdity, aspiration and hard luck into one object