1992 Film "Boheemielämää"

Finland France Italy Sweden - Black and white

Alternate titles	FR: La vie de bohème = US: Bohemian life
Production	Klaus Heydemann (executive) and Aki Kaurismäki for Svenska Filminstitutet (SFI) / Films A2 / Pandora Film / Pyramide Production / Sputnik OY
Story	Aki Kaurismäki adapted from a novel by Henri Murger, Les scènes de la vie de bohème (1847-1849)
Director	Aki Kaurismäki
Cinematography	Timo Salminen
Cast	Gilles Charmant (Hugo), Kenneth Colley, Evelyne Didi (Mimi), Philippe Dormoy, Samuel Fuller (Gassot), Jean-Pierre Léaud (Blancheron), Louis Malle (gentleman), Christine Murillo (Musette), Matti Pellonpää (Rodolfo), André Penvern, Kari Väänänen (Schaunard), André Wilms (Marcel)
Language	French
Filming Location	Paris (France)
Film Editing	Veikko Aaltonen
Other crew	John Ebden (scenography), Jouko Lumme (sound)
Runtime	103 minutes (Sweden), 100 minutes (France, USA)
Release date	DE: 1992.02.27 FI: 1992.02.28 SE: 1992.03.06 FR: 1992.03.18
Certification	SE: (Btl)
Admissions	SE: 3'350
Gross	SE: SEK 200'517
Awards	Matti Pellonpää won the Felix for "Best actor" at the European Film Awards 1992. André Wilms won the Felix for "Best supporting actor" at the European Film Awards 1992.
Note	The movie is referenced in Missä on Musette? (1992)
Synopsis	Written after Henri Murgers book Scènes de la vie de bohème the movie shows the meeting between Rodolfo, an Albanian refugee and painter, Marcel, a French writer, and Schaunard, an Irish composer. This melodrama tells us their lifes and their relations to Mimi and Musette, two beauties living in the big town.

Literature

• Rebichon, Michel. In: Studio (France), March 1992, p. 22
• Bernard, Jean-Jacques. In: Première (France), April 1992, p. 26
• Rosner, Heiko. In: Cinema (Hamburg), 27.02.1992

Reviews

1993.11.05 Washington Post / Desson Howe

La vie de bohème

Nothing actually "happens" in an Aki Kaurismäki film. But things emerge - deadpan, funny things. You have tobecome accustomed to the movie's low blood pressure, its subtly satiric rhythms.
The Finnish director has an exact target in mind, the niche between pathos and true poignance. His characters seem subdued, even hypnotized, but they're single-mindedly aware of the grim existence around their necks. The effect is funny, but not whoopingly campy. Their personal pain is too real and involving to push them into that zone.
In La vie de bohème, Kaurismäki's slow-and-steady mood piece about artistic squalor in Paris, all of these things come into signature play.
Based on the same 19th-century novel (Henri Murger's Scènes de la vie de bohème) that inspired Puccini's opera, the story is about three down-and-out losers doomed to penury and artistic obsession. There's Albanian painter Rodolfo (Matti Pellonpää), playwright Marcel (André Wilms) and composer Schaunard (Kari Vaananen).
Their problems are exactly the same: no rent or food money and the futile struggle to be recognized. It doesn't help Marcel that he refuses to reduce his 21-act play to commercial size or that the chances of Schaunard's latest work making it (it's called The influence of blue on art) seem remote.
The story - by Kaurismàki's disingenuous admission - is intentionally awful and meandering. But it's regularly interrupted by the mutely amusing - or the sad. Enter, for instance, rich gentleman Jean-Pierre Leaud (François Truffaut's erstwhile leading man), who commissions a self-portrait from Rodolfo. While Leaud poses, playwright Marcel, pretending to hang up the client's tuxedo jacket, uses it for a job interview. He gets the job and brings the jacket back just in time (actually, he's about 10 excruciating seconds late).
An affair between Rodolfo and Mimi (Evelyne Didi), a quiet, constantly perturbed woman, becomes very real, particularly when poverty (and Rodolfo's eviction by the immigration authorities) forces them apart. She eventually returns but they have to face her tubercular future together.

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