La vie de bohème (1992), Aki Kaurismäki’s ninth feature, was at least the fourteenth filmed

adaptation of Henri Murger’s episodic 1848 semi-novel, which is most famous for its operatic
adaptation by Giacomo Puccini. The details of its setting and plot have been worn transparent
from passing through so many hands over so many years: the garrets, the quest for inspiration,
the pawning of possessions, the commodity value of the black frock coat, the knell that sounds as
a slight tubercular cough. “Starving artists” has become a trade name for hucksters selling couch
art from China in New Jersey motel conference rooms. Murger’s book has both endured and
faded because of its fervent, wholehearted, mulishly determined sentimentality. You’d imagine,
reasonably enough, that any adaptation made in the last quarter century would be either
indigestibly saccharine or toe-curlingly cynical.

But that would be to reckon without the singular worldview that is Kaurismäki’s. In his movies,
innocence is a moral decision that can be arrived at only after passing through many trials. He
fully subscribes to his characters, from their largest ambitions to their smallest crotchets. His
movies are often hilarious, but their humor is earned by grief. We don’t laugh at anyone’s
expense; we laugh because we’ve been there. All of this permits him to treat Murger’s story in a
completely straightforward fashion, without irony or superciliousness—or nostalgia, since his
film takes place, somehow, in both the present and the past. Although Kaurismäki originally
intended to shoot the picture in his hometown of Helsinki, he came to realize that it could be
made only in Paris. So he shot it in the southern suburb of Malakoff, which was both cheaper and
more authentically run-down (those of Murger’s original locations that weren’t demolished by
Baron Haussmann in the nineteenth century were gutted by André Malraux in the 1960s). The
production is as bare-bones as the characters’ lives; a projected silhouette of a train substitutes
for an expensive setup at a station. The characters may be eating and sleeping two hundred years
ago—or three hundred; the props are so basic they may as well be eternal—but they go to the
café-tabac and the nightclub in 1992, because those are just down the street.

Fervent, inspired, but somewhat impractical dedication is central to Kaurismäki’s idea of

bohemia, a concept that probably got going among impoverished art students in Paris at the very
beginning of the nineteenth century (before then, the term encompassed, according to Karl Marx,
“vagabonds, cashiered soldiers, ex-cons, swindlers, mountebanks, pickpockets, knife-grinders,
tinkers, beggars”) but that Murger put on the map forty years later. From his perch at the Café
Momus, near the Louvre, Murger, a working-class belletrist with no money and many
afflictions—purpura gave him a “macabre” complexion, his eyes watered incessantly—wrote
stories about idealized versions of his friends, which ran in a newspaper called Le Corsaire-
Satan (Baudelaire was another contributor, although not a friend). When the stories were
assembled into Scènes de la vie de bohème, it captured the imagination of the world. Murger’s
sentimental linking of misery and glory suddenly made many people aspire to glorious misery.
Some of them were undoubtedly poseurs and trend followers, but there were many like
Kaurismäki’s characters: martyrs and anchorites of the faith of art.
The film’s story is distilled from but faithful to the Murger; Kaurismäki avoids Murger’s bathos
merely by playing things straight and with his trademark deadpan. It involves three friends: the
lyric poet Marcel Marx (André Wilms), the Albanian painter Rodolfo (Matti Pellonpää), and the
Irish composer Schaunard (Kari Väänänen). Marcel is evicted from his garret in favor of
Schaunard, but he continues to live there anyway. Rodolfo makes hopeless naive paintings to no
effect, until he meets an eccentric collector (Jean-Pierre Léaud). Marcel’s epic is similarly
rejected, but then a publisher (Samuel Fuller) hires him as the editor of a fashion magazine, The
Sash of Iris. And Schaunard’s compositions are spat upon, but he doesn’t seem to care, lustily
bashing away at musique concrète that is equal parts Dada and vaudeville. All three find
romantic partners, but it is Rodolfo who truly falls in love, with Mimi (Evelyne Didi), who is so
sad-eyed that she alone in the cast is sometimes permitted to smile. Rodolfo is deported but then
sneaks back to France; he loses Mimi to the sort of rich vagrant who is always taking girlfriends
away; all three artists become reacquainted with starvation. Once they have scraped together
enough for an All Saints’ Day meal, the festivities are interrupted by Mimi’s return. She has a
slight cough and is running a temperature.

Kaurismäki catches a tone of matter-of-fact fatalism that is probably much closer to that of the
real bohemians than Murger’s impossibly pure exemplars. It allows a realistic view of those
appalling existences, such as that of the writer Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, who was so poor he had
neither paper nor table, so that he wrote on cigarette papers or wrappers fished from the trash
while lying on his stomach on the floor, or that, somewhat later, of Francis Carco, who climbed
lampposts to heat his tea on the gas jet and once, in a restaurant, dribbled gravy on the slate on
which his bill was written, then called over the house dog to lick it clean—a detail Kaurismäki
might conceivably have used. The young Picasso, for that matter, at one point did not own a pair
of shoes, and had to borrow some whenever he wanted to leave his garret. Such stories have
circulated primarily about people who later made good, of course; many others took theirs to the
grave, which is what you tend to imagine would be the case for Marcel, Rodolfo, and Schaunard.

I don’t know a word of Finnish, but I’m assured that the language in Kaurismäki’s other pictures
is of a piece with the French spoken in this one: formal, correct, literary in such a pure if antique
way that it defeats mildew. It is probably how Murger’s people spoke in real life. Pellonpää and
Väänänen, who didn’t speak a syllable of French, learned their lines phonetically (and if it is
marginally possible to imagine Rodolfo as Albanian, the idea of Schaunard being Irish is a gag
unto itself), but Wilms, a distinguished French stage actor who can infuse lines bordering on
fustian with freshness and urgency, sets the verbal tone for the picture. (Note that in
Kaurismäki’s 2011 Le Havre, a very different kind of movie, Wilms again plays a character
named Marcel Marx, a “former artist” who speaks much the same way.) There is, in any case,
not much more excess dialogue than in any of Kaurismäki’s pictures.

Wilms’s Marcel has such elevated thoughts that he rarely seems more than mildly perturbed in
any circumstance. Rather than raising his voice or loosening his syntax when he is agitated, he
just speaks a bit faster, this despite the many indignities to which he is subjected. When we first
meet him, he is trash picking; he falls into the bins and cuts his upper lip. Disfiguring bandage in
place, he repairs to a bar where he is served what he can afford: a thimble-sized glass of wine.
(There actually was such a portion in nineteenth-century Paris: a large glass was a monsieur, a
small one was a mademoiselle, and a glass barely big enough for an entire gulp was a misérable.)
Whether he is temporarily riding high—hubristically serializing his interminable verse drama in
the fashion magazine—or barely concealing his indigence, he maintains an air of slightly harried
dignity, as if he were the leader of a parliamentary faction.

Väänänen’s Schaunard looks like a very large alley cat, or a particularly disreputable hippie who
has decided to upgrade his wardrobe in order to visit the disco, while neglecting his slimy hair
and the growth of crabgrass on his face. Despite displaying no visible means of support, he does
not appear to be short of cash. He is, however, usually looking out for number one; when he
treats his friends to dinner, he produces a sausage baguette, cutting half of it into portions for
Marcel, Rodolfo, Mimi, and Marcel’s secretary-cum-paramour Musette, then eats the other half
himself. At one point, he treats himself to a car, a three-wheeled micro-coupe that looks a bit like
a duck (it appears to be a Reliant Robin), which itself becomes a character. The charge of one
emotionally fraught scene is conveyed by the car, with the three friends clustered inside, beating
its windshield wipers to the rhythm of Little Willie John’s “Leave My Kitten Alone.”

Pellonpää’s Rodolfo is, on the other hand, doglike—partly a matter of his long, center-parted
hair, his walrus mustache, and his doleful eyes combining to give the impression of a stately but
wounded hound. Until his untimely death in 1995, Pellonpää was Kaurismäki’s most frequent
male lead, perhaps something of an alter ego. He played many different sorts of characters but
endowed all of them with the gravity he displays here, which fittingly and despite the obvious
differences has something akin to Buster Keaton’s. His composure, always suggesting hidden
pain, makes him an ideal subject for Kuleshov’s famous montage experiment—the same expres-
sion, depending on what he is looking at, can make him appear frightened, insulted, mortified,
hungry, or love-struck.

One departure from Murger’s text is the character of Mimi, who in the book is initially young
and wild, a party girl. As played by Didi, also a French stage actor of many years’ standing, she
is not only more mature but, from her first appearance, a mask of tragedy. And this remains the
case whether she is being romanced by Rodolfo or working behind the counter of the tabac or
appearing on the arm of the lounge lizard Francis (Jean-Paul Wenzel). But it all works
nevertheless—she seems a cognate of the tragic voice of Damia, the great chanteuse whose song
“Chantez pour moi, violons” accompanies the opening credits. She can articulate, with a glance,
all the emotions that the men repress or dissimulate or sidestep.

It wouldn’t be a Kaurismäki picture without a wild rockabilly band (the aptly named Fake
Trashmen, performing a particularly unhinged variation on “Surfin’ Bird”), and it wouldn’t be a
Kaurismäki picture without an eloquent and significant dog. I think it’s safe to say that no
director in the entire history of motion pictures has understood and showcased dogs as
effectively as he does. Dogs appear in nearly all of his films, and they are never there for merely
decorative purposes. The Laika here, playing the role of Baudelaire, is not the same Laika as in
Le Havre, but they are presumably related, since the latter, the current Kaurismäki family dog, is
described as a “fifth-generation canine actress in a line of dogs” that have appeared in many of
his pictures. The Laika here, with her soulful demeanor and her silken black Belgian shepherd
looks, is perfectly cast as the long-suffering bohemian conscript.

Shot in pearly black and white that registers every bit of grit and grime and translates it into a
kind of classical serenity, La vie de bohème is an exemplary Kaurismäki movie, one of his best
pictures and of a piece with the balance of his consistently rich and richly consistent oeuvre. It is
concerned with the struggle for love and wherewithal, that is, and it treasures people for their
failings as much as their strengths. It is sad and funny, sometimes in the same instant. It is calm
and intermittently manic, drunken and cold sober, romantic and realistic. It brims over with soul.
It stands as a rebuke to the many kinds of imposture that try to pass themselves off as movies in
the multiplex era. It is radically and unapologetically human.

Luc Sante’s books include Low Life and Kill All Your Darlings.