Rating: 
Summary: Life Offers Much If You Want to Live (4.5 stars)
Review: "A Man without a Past", a 2002 masterpiece of Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki, may well be his best film to date. It relates the story of a welder (Markku Peltola), who is one night coming home from work and while resting on a bench he is assaulted by a group of muggers and beaten almost to death. Yet he regains consciousness, but only to find he does not remember who he is, what's his name -- anything.Subsequently, the man is taken care of by a community of very-close-to-homeless people, who, nevertheless, lend a helping hand, together with a local Salvation Army group. The man even starts a relationship with a shy, devout Army member Irma (Kati Outinen). "A Man without a Past" is a film about humanity, about what makes us human, about that we all are different but everyone of us can be an asset to those around us -- and it needn't necessarily be a money aid. The people in this movie help and get the help back. Kaurismaki's directing is up to par with another European great, Almodovar, in that he understands his characters and tolerates their minor mistakes. The film has many great moments, brilliant dialogues and even a melodramatic ending. Actors' performances are very natural and although the every single character has his/her very own way of viewing the world, the story is ultimately quite believable. After all, life itself writes most unbelievable stories. Deservedly winning several awards at 2002 Cannes festival, "A Man without a Past" scored the first ever Foreign Film Oscar nomination for Finland. I was writing this review five days before the Oscar ceremony and I saw none of its four contenders, but I felt this Finnish film was a favourite and destined to become a classic. If you're looking for a film to watch for entertainment and great cinema at once, this may be it. And you will get a large dose of warmth to your heart as a bonus.
Rating:
Summary: Great Sequel
Review: "The Man Without a Past" is the fine sequel to "Kauas pilvet Karkaavat"("Drifting Clouds"). This film deserved the Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film for 2002(Finland). The plot is brilliant! It combines tragegy, hope, love, and anger beautifully. From the moment the lead character is severely assaulted and left with amnesia, the chain of events continue to build until the end, giving the audience the added excitement the whole time. Multiple ironic details are discovered as "the man"(he doesn't remember his name) slowly regains his memory. Many unexpected events occur, keeping everything interesting. Every actor pours their heart and soul through their characters, giving the movie theme the added emotion. Shamefully, none of them received any Oscar nominations. "The Man Without a Past" is a great movie for those looking for something unique. Many will be entertained.
Rating:
Summary: Great Sequel
Review: "The Man Without a Past" is the fine sequel to "Kauas pilvet Karkaavat"("Drifting Clouds"). This film deserved the Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film for 2002(Finland). The plot is brilliant! It combines tragegy, hope, love, and anger beautifully. From the moment the lead character is severely assaulted and left with amnesia, the chain of events continue to build until the end, giving the audience the added excitement the whole time. Multiple ironic details are discovered as "the man"(he doesn't remember his name) slowly regains his memory. Many unexpected events occur, keeping everything interesting. Every actor pours their heart and soul through their characters, giving the movie theme the added emotion. Shamefully, none of them received any Oscar nominations. "The Man Without a Past" is a great movie for those looking for something unique. Many will be entertained.
Rating:
Summary: Great Sequel
Review: "The Man Without a Past" is the fine sequel to "Kauas pilvet Karkaavat"("Drifting Clouds"). This film deserved the Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film for 2002(Finland). The plot is brilliant! It combines tragegy, hope, love, and anger beautifully. From the moment the lead character is severely assaulted and left with amnesia, the chain of events continue to build until the end, giving the audience the added excitement the whole time. Multiple ironic details are discovered as "the man"(he doesn't remember his name) slowly regains his memory. Many unexpected events occur, keeping everything interesting. Every actor pours their heart and soul through their characters, giving the movie theme the added emotion. Shamefully, none of them received any Oscar nominations. "The Man Without a Past" is a great movie for those looking for something unique. Many will be entertained.
Rating: 
Summary: Quietly Rediscovering Life
Review: A man (Markku Peltola) develops nearly complete amnesia when he is beaten and left for dead shortly after arriving in Helsinki. After being nursed back to health by a poor but generous family, he must make a new life for himself without the benefit of anything to start with. His lack of identity proves to be an obstacle in this increasingly bureaucratized world. But his spirits are lifted when he meets as falls in love with a Salvation Army worker (Kati Outinen) who has helped him. "The Man Without a Past" is the second film in director Aki Kaurismaki's "Finland Trilogy". (The first was 1996's "Drifting Clouds".) I am not sure of the precise time in which the film is supposed to take place, but it looks like the 1950's in costumes and cars, and also in the characteristics of the film stock. The colors in "The Man Without a Past" look a lot like Technicolor. The recent Hollywood trend to revive old cinematographic techniques and approximate old film stocks seems to have traveled beyond the borders of the United States -or maybe it started there. And why not, as still photographers have never hesitated to use archaic methods or materials if it would give them the desired result . I'm all for it in motion pictures if it adds something to the story, and here it does. "The Man Without a Past" is a quiet film about mostly quiet characters, both literally and figuratively. The characters speak very little, and when they speak it is frequently in vague terms. Funny lines are always delivered completely deadpan. But I wouldn't call the film pretentious. It's as low-key as its subjects. It's just about a man rediscovering his identity and a joy for life, and finding a place for himself for a second time, at a much later point in life than we usually do these things. Many movie goers will find "The Man Without a Past" too uneventful, but if you'd like a quiet, almost delicate, film with a good-humored outlook, this is a good one. Finnish with English subtitles. The DVD allows you to turn the subtitles on or off, but there are no bonus features.
Rating:
Summary: A micro-society of the Finnish past...
Review: A man arrives to Helsinki by train and he stops by a park in order to get some rest, but he is attacked by three thugs that leave him for dead. He is brought to a hospital where he is pronounced dead, but he struggles and returns to life. He leaves the hospital, but passes out again and when he wakes up he suffers from amnesia. He finds himself powerless in his search for housing and a job, since he cannot remember his name or past. As an outcast he moves into a large metal container by the sea outside Helsinki in order to get back on his feet. Man Without a Past is Kaurismäki's second installment in a Finnish trilogy and it displays the strong will and struggle of the Finnish people, which is also known as "Sisu". It can also symbolize the hundreds of years when Finland was occupied by foreign powers such as Russia, Sweden, and Germany. These three foreign powers can be represented as the three thugs in the film. In the end, Man Without a Past is a warm film that offers a wonderful cinematic experience.
Rating:
Summary: A micro-society of the Finnish past...
Review: A man arrives to Helsinki by train and he stops by a park in order to get some rest, but he is attacked by three thugs that leave him for dead. He is brought to a hospital where he is pronounced dead, but he struggles and returns to life. He leaves the hospital, but passes out again and when he wakes up he suffers from amnesia. He finds himself powerless in his search for housing and a job, since he cannot remember his name or past. As an outcast he moves into a large metal container by the sea outside Helsinki in order to get back on his feet. Man Without a Past is Kaurismäki's second installment in a Finnish trilogy and it displays the strong will and struggle of the Finnish people, which is also known as "Sisu". It can also symbolize the hundreds of years when Finland was occupied by foreign powers such as Russia, Sweden, and Germany. These three foreign powers can be represented as the three thugs in the film. In the end, Man Without a Past is a warm film that offers a wonderful cinematic experience.
Rating:
Summary: TIMELESS FILM OF OUR TIME
Review: A rough hewn, not quite middle aged man arrives by train in Helsinki, Finland, and while resting on a lonely public bench three street thugs intent on beating him to death steal his belongings. The man is left for dead by the gang who cover his face with a welder's mask, a clue to the victim's identity. In the hospital, an unsympathetic doctor and assistant try to revive the badly beaten man. But as the heart monitor flatlines (perhaps the only weak moment in the entire film), the doctor comments to his assistant before rushing off, "He's better off that way rather than living like a vegetable." The assistant dutifully covers up the "dead" man and she leaves. Like the classic horror movie character the Mummy, his head and arm swaddled in bandages, the man suddenly rises from the "dead," and escapes to the desolate waterfront where he collapses next to the harbor. The man is rescued and taken in by the floatsam and jetsam of Finnish society who live in discarded steel cargo containers strewn along the waterfront. Thus begins this film by one of Finland's most distinguished producer-director Aki Kaurismaki. This is a poor but strangely light hearted world where a dinner invitation to "eat out" means standing in the Salvation Army soup line. It's a place where a local residentwho lives in a dumpster complains, "If the garbage strike continues, I'll have to go on a diet, or move." The hero's Salvation Army love interest Irma, as played by Kati Outinen, is especially good. She portrays a repressed worker who falls in love with the amnesiac. Outinen won the Grand Jury Prize as Best Actress at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival for her stellar performance. All of the funny scenes are done deadpan, melting together the comic and melancholic into a big hobo's stew that could puzzle some viewers. But if you can get used to the low-affect approach, you'll be charmed by the film's gentle, affectionate portrayals. There are many hugely funny scenes, such as the one in which the Man teaches the staid and joyless Salvation Army quartet to play rhythm 'n blues and rock-and-roll, complete with a huge, aging female singer. There are poignant scenes as well, treated with gentle whimsy by Kaurismäki. In THE MAN WITHOUT A PAST, Kaurismaki has created for us a simple, mesmerizing story of a working stiff who stoically engages life's abrasions without complaint after having suffered total amnesia. The movie had won a best actress Jury Prize at the 2002 Cannes film festival and was nominated for but did not win a 2003 Academy Award. It should have won an Oscar. See this film with the original Finnish sound track and English subtitles (which sometimes get illegibly washed out). The sounds and innuendoes are important. No doubt Kaurismaki's masterpiece will go on to become a classic much like those of Luis Bunuel, Ingemar Bergmann, and Akira Kurosawa.
Rating:
Summary: Love Story in Finland: Tender, Quiet, and Life-Affirming
Review: Finally America acknowledged the undeniable talent of this prolific Finnish director, Aki Kaurismaki, by giving this film Oscar nomination (for foreign language films). His acquired taste for droll, dead-pan humor is fmous among the fans; unfortunately some find it hard to savor the taste at first, but it will be infectious after several repeated watching. Plus "The Man without a Past" is a love story, too, and a good one. It starts with a middle-aged man at Helsinki station, where he is attacked by muggers. He loses his memories, and wanders in the city, looking for a help. The bureaucrats are not kind, but the people living in a deserted contanier by the port offers one, and he starts a new life. He just has to look forward. And he meets a lady Irma working at the Salvation Amry (Kati Outinen, Kaurismaki's muse). She looks rigid in uptight uniform, but actually a kind of a woman who listens to rock'n'roll music at her apartment. The man and Irma fall in love with each other -- it's Irma's first love -- and the film follows the life of them (and those of other oddball characters) very tenderly. To explain the plot itself is almost pointless. The charm of "The Man without a Past" comes to you when you realize that the apparently small things in life depicted here can be the source of happiness for the characters. Irma and the man are both ordinary people, to whom slight things mean a lot. And the subtle expressions of Kati Outinen perfectly conveys the sense of the blissful life even if you don't have much money. The humor is eveywhere. with Kaurismaki's original touch. The hospitalized man (after mugged at the station) looks exactly like an "Invisible Man" with bandages all over his face (a sly mataphor); "The fierce dog" named "Hannibal" is actually a lazy pup who seems to refuse to bite; the bank robber is actually a kind-hearted guy whose motive for the crime is nothing selfish. And see the unique defence tactics of the lawyer at court. Thus, behind the story, you notice Kauismaki insert his commentary about the Finnish society. But the film is a life-affirming love story, and best enjoyed as such. The ending is one of the best I have seen in love stories, and you will leave the theater quietly smiling. Trivia: The Salvation Army manager/vocal of the band is played by Annikki Tahti, famous singer in Finland. The song you hear at the end of the film "Do You Remember Monrepos?" is her hit song in 1955.
Rating:
Summary: Love Story in Finland: Tender, Quiet, and Life-Affirming
Review: Finally America acknowledged the undeniable talent of this prolific Finnish director, Aki Kaurismaki, by giving this film Oscar nomination (for foreign language films). His acquired taste for droll, dead-pan humor is fmous among the fans; unfortunately some find it hard to savor the taste at first, but it will be infectious after several repeated watching. Plus "The Man without a Past" is a love story, too, and a good one. It starts with a middle-aged man at Helsinki station, where he is attacked by muggers. He loses his memories, and wanders in the city, looking for a help. The bureaucrats are not kind, but the people living in a deserted contanier by the port offers one, and he starts a new life. He just has to look forward. And he meets a lady Irma working at the Salvation Amry (Kati Outinen, Kaurismaki's muse). She looks rigid in uptight uniform, but actually a kind of a woman who listens to rock'n'roll music at her apartment. The man and Irma fall in love with each other -- it's Irma's first love -- and the film follows the life of them (and those of other oddball characters) very tenderly. To explain the plot itself is almost pointless. The charm of "The Man without a Past" comes to you when you realize that the apparently small things in life depicted here can be the source of happiness for the characters. Irma and the man are both ordinary people, to whom slight things mean a lot. And the subtle expressions of Kati Outinen perfectly conveys the sense of the blissful life even if you don't have much money. The humor is eveywhere. with Kaurismaki's original touch. The hospitalized man (after mugged at the station) looks exactly like an "Invisible Man" with bandages all over his face (a sly mataphor); "The fierce dog" named "Hannibal" is actually a lazy pup who seems to refuse to bite; the bank robber is actually a kind-hearted guy whose motive for the crime is nothing selfish. And see the unique defence tactics of the lawyer at court. Thus, behind the story, you notice Kauismaki insert his commentary about the Finnish society. But the film is a life-affirming love story, and best enjoyed as such. The ending is one of the best I have seen in love stories, and you will leave the theater quietly smiling. Trivia: The Salvation Army manager/vocal of the band is played by Annikki Tahti, famous singer in Finland. The song you hear at the end of the film "Do You Remember Monrepos?" is her hit song in 1955.
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