Word: murger
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Even though both work from the same source, Henri Murger's 19th century novel Scenes de la vie de boheme, where Puccini draws his demi-monde of starving artists with heavy strokes of romantic melodrama, Kaurismaki chooses ironic distance and absurd comedy. The result is a witty but frustrating film, whose saving grace is the beauty of its images of Paris...
...protagonists of Murger's novel are flamboyant, young artists, but the 150 years since its publication have not been kind to these bohemians. Kaurismaki makes them too scruffy to be dashing and too old, it seems, to be passionate. Inexplicably, Rodolfo (Matti Pellonpaa) has been made an illegal immigrant from Albania (perhaps this detail is meant to account for his occasionally irritating accent). All three artists seem to have given up the struggle to attain fame and wealth about 10 years ago. For most of the film, they can barely manage the energy to light a cigarette...
...Murger's novel was originally published as a series of anecdotal sketches for the comic magazine Le Corsaire in 1845, and "La Vie de Boheme" is faithful to the novel in at least this respect: it seems like a series of loosely connected episodes, and of photographic tableaux. In fact, the film's only logic is visual, tracing the progression of the seasons and the alternation of night and day in the changing contours of the urban landscape. Cinematographer Timo Salminen has done some brilliant work, coaxing charm aplenty from the city of light (and, in this case, shadow) without...
...selling Legion appointments foi $3,000 apiece. One Premier of the Third Republic, Pierre-Maurice Rou-vier, casually made his mistress' husband a Legionnaire because "of the special services rendered to me by his wife." Once when he was having bad luck fishing, legend has it, Author Henri Murger (La Vie de Boheme) baited his hook with his scarlet ribbon and said: "Now they are sure to bite. This is something everyone likes...
Critic Olin Downes once noted that Tebaldi's strapping Mimi bore little resemblance to the fragile figure Puccini and Murger conceived her to be; but he added that Tebaldi sang so movingly, with such tragic overtones, that her "enlarged portrait" emerged as more compelling than the original. The same thing might be said of most of her famous roles: in the end, a colleague notes, "they always come out Tebaldi...