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Attendance was minimal at the screening I attended of Aki Kaurismaki‘s Lights in the Dusk, which played at the Gene Siskel Film Center last week (July 20-26), though somehow you suspect Kaurismaki would’ve wanted it that way. Or maybe this way: one lonely viewer in an otherwise empty theater, the better to nip any general stirrings of levity in the bud. Laugh if you absolutely have to, but if you do you’re on your own, with only the empty seats as witness to your, well . . . unseemly outburst! Since all of Kaurismaki is about tamping down, putting the clamps on tone, not reinforcing whatever irruptive impulses you’d want to entertain: it’s just you and the everlasting universal maw, which, as we all know, ultimately swallows you whole. Second law of thermodynamics: everything winds down . . . except Kaurismaki’s already been there ahead of you.
Anyway, lichens on a tundra clinging to the rocks is what Lights in the Dusk puts me in mind of most. So is that some kind of beautiful or what?
