Word: vies
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...Vie de Boheme...
...could be forgiven for thinking that "La Vie de Boheme," the latest film from Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki, is a cinematic adaptation of Puccini's opera of almost the same name. The confusion shouldn't last long, though. The film's first scene cuts from a rooftop panorama of Paris to a shot of the starving writer Marcel (Andre Wilms) digging through a pile of trash, muttering "merde...
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...
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...
...Paris (not simply of the view-down-the-Champs-Elyseeshey-we're-in-Paris variety) that the film's foreground and background are reversed. The city takes center stage, and the actors become simply street performers, amusing us with their starving artist routine. Set against the backdrop of "La Vie de Boheme," Kaurismaki has produced a gorgeous film about Paris...