The Man Without a Past

It pairs with today's other film, The Vanishing: there someone vanishes from the world; here someone vanishes from his own memory. Halloween is about a thinning boundary, and Kaurismäki draws another kind — a man the system has written off as "nothing" who grows a new life for himself in the overlooked corners. This 2002 Finnish film won the Grand Prix at Cannes and remains the only Finnish film ever nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

一个男人乘夜车抵达赫尔辛基，在公园长椅上睡着后被三名劫匪打成重伤，醒来时失去了全部记忆——他连自己的名字都不记得。 他被港口一户住在废弃集装箱里的家庭发现，被救活、被收留。此后，港口那些被主流社会甩在身后的人一个接一个向他伸出手：帮他安顿、帮他在救世军找到工作、把并不体面却踏实的生活一点点拼回他身上。 影片几乎没有解释他的过去，也不追问他本来是谁。它把全部的力气都放在「一个人没有过去，能不能重新开始」这件事上。

At Cannes in 2002 Kaurismäki took the Grand Prix (Grand Prize of the Jury); the following year it earned a nomination for Best Foreign Language Film at the 75th Academy Awards — the first and, to date, the only such nomination for a Finnish film. It is the second part of his Finland trilogy (after Drifting Clouds, 1996; before Lights in the Dusk, 2006). Kaurismäki's signature is minimal, deadpan, yet warmly humane comedy: little dialogue, long pauses, old rock and tango on the soundtrack, and characters drawn from society's margins. What is unusual here is that he treats amnesia without either sentimentality or suspense, as a modern fable: when a man is stripped of every proof of who he was, he gains the freedom to choose who he will be.