The Bohemian Life

Like [Kaurismaki's] near-perfect "Match Factory Girl," "La Vie de Boheme" elicits laughter in the bleakest, most impeccably controlled fashion. [25 Feb 1994, p.35]

Aki Kaurismäki’s postmodern reinterpretation of Henri Merger’s classic parable both reconciled the thematic notions he had been working with over the years as well as refined the stylistic shorthand with which he had become so proficient.

What Kaurismaki does is quite simply to introduce us to a bunch of losers and make us care for them more than we would have ever dreamed possible.

Nothing actualy "happens" in an Aki Kaurismaki film. But things emerge -- deadpan, funny things. You have to become accustomed to the movie's low blood pressure, its subtly satiric rhythms.

From the look and manner of his films, Aki Kaurismaki would seem to be like the character in "Li'l Abner" who walks the earth shadowed by a small dark cloud. The cloud follows him with the fidelity of a severely depressed hound dog. It's almost affectionate. Yet the cloud isn't big enough to block out the sun completely, and life lived in the penumbra can sometimes be astonishingly rich.

One of the problems with the film is the shifting, almost unstable tone. It's not clear whether Kaurismaki is poking fun at the outdated melodrama or paying it some sort of distant homage. [25 Feb 1994, p.J2]

After a half hour or so all this emotional distancing -- compounded by a narrative that's hardly more than a series of thinly related vignettes -- leaves the audience with little to hold on to, scene by scene. Still, Kaurismaki's cleverness keeps ''Boheme'' mildly amusing. [22 Sep 1993, p.E3]