Now, La Jolla is very pretty, but it was laid out by a sadistic moron. It took me an hour to go a couple of miles because I kept getting lost. I’m not stupid, and I have a pretty good sense of direction, but when no road goes straight for more than 100 feet, and streets abruptly end in (livability-taboo) cul-de-sacs, and Torrey Pines Road intersects itself, and roads are named La Jolla Village Road, Villa La Jolla Drive, La Jolla Road, etc.—well, the potential is high for befuddlement. To cap it off, the large display sign for the shopping center in which the theater is located lists every business therein except the theater; it was just by luck that I pulled in there, having given up on the theater and now looking for food.
So by the time I finally slid into a seat, I was wound up, and it took me some time to relax into director Aki Kaurismäki’s laid-back world. His sly, gentle humor isn’t the laugh-out-loud kind; rather, it brings a warm smile to your face. In his quirky sensibilities and affection for those outside society, Kaurismäki is like a less self-consciously arty Jim Jarmusch or a more emotionally connected Coen brother.
Despite its setting in modern Helsinki (and let me take this opportunity to point out that the film is, in fact, in Finnish, so that you don’t annoy your fellow moviegoers the way a woman in my audience did when she stood up ten minutes into the movie and announced with wounded disgust, “Subtitles?!” and stormed out. I mean, duh—even if you don’t bother to learn anything about the movie you’re paying to see, you should at least know that if you’re in a Landmark Theatre, you have a 50-50 chance of seeing a subtitled film), The Man Without a Past resonates with echoes of classic American cinema. The bold, rich palette evokes the Technicolor films of the ‘50s, and star Markku Peltola, as the titular man who wakes from a severe beating and mugging with no memory of his life or even his name, is in the John Garfield school of square-jawed heroes. Silent, he’s as soulfully expressive as Charlie Chaplin; indeed, some of his scenes are so Little Tramp-ish that I half expected him to start boiling his shoe.
Helpless and alone, he must depend on the kindness of strangers, a motley group on the fringe of society who have almost nothing but willingly share with him what little they have. He builds a new life, which includes a sweet, hesitant romance with a similarly lonely Salvation Army worker (Kati Outinen) and a hilarious budding friendship with a deceptively gruff security guard (Sakari Kuosmanen) and his savage dog.
The movie was a touch slow, although my jangled nerves may have short-circuited my patience. But it’s a lovely, low-key story, with humor that’s peculiarly dark yet warmly affectionate.
Well, there’s no artful way to segue from “sweet romance” to “I’m a big ho,” except to say that my father should probably stop reading right about here. But I can’t pass up the chance to announce that, during the convention, I went to a self-proclaimed sleazy bar one night, did a shot of Night Train with a tattooed sailor, and invited him back to my hotel room.
(You know, even when I was allowed to drink, I wouldn’t touch Night Train. Besides, I didn’t know people did shots of it; I always thought it was more of a sipping beverage. But, life is about new experiences, and at least I wasn’t drinking it out of a paper bag.)
Now, I know it sounds bad in retrospect—hell, not even in retrospect; at the time, I was thinking that this was at best spectacularly stupid and at worst incredibly dangerous. But in the worst case, I figured, at least I would live forever in AIA lore (“…and they never found her head...”) and in safety tips for conventioneers everywhere. That is, if they really think it necessary to state: “We do not recommend that you go to a strange bar in an unfamiliar city by yourself, drink Night Train with a stranger, and invite him back to your room. Even if you have had a really shitty day and really need someone to be nice to you.” I mean, that seems pretty self-evident.
But, as you can probably tell by the fact that my head is still attached to my body (not that you can see me, but take my word for it), he not only was not an ax murderer, he was actually nice. (Which, of course, made me really want to tell him that I never do this kind of thing, but unfortunately, that’s the kind of statement that becomes less believable the more often and earnestly you say it, kind of like, “I’m a very good driver” or “It was like that when I got here.”) And he wasn't what you're probably picturing when I say "tattooed sailor" -- he was with the Coast Guard, he'd voted for Ralph Nader in 2000, and he had a philosophy degree from Southern Illinois University ("The Salukis!" I blurted when he told me where he went to college; he was surprised and pleased that I knew his school's mascot, but I admitted it was due to my consuming NCAA addiction.)
See, I had gone into this bar across the street from my hotel, which brags that it was the setting for the “sleazy bar scene” in Top Gun, to get some food, because I was exhausted and hungry, and room service at the hotel sucked, and the only other close dining options sucked. As I was waiting for my take-out order, a guy next to me tried to strike up a conversation with me, but I was all up in my pissy self-pity and basically blew him off. I went back to my hotel, and as I ate, I thought about what I’d say to the coworker I was expecting to call me: “This is what this job does to me: a cute boy just tried to chat me up, and I said, ‘No, thank you.’” Suddenly I realized, “Holy shit: a cute boy just tried to chat me up, and I said, ‘No, thank you’!”
So I went back across the street, rehearsing a
brazen
opening line, and when I got there, I lost my nerve to play the
“Fleet’s
in!” floozy, but he seemed pleased to see me (and basically, he was the
first person that day who’d shown any kind of reaction to my
presence).
I finally got up the courage to invite him back to my room, although
much
less suavely than I’d played it in my head, and he seemed shocked,
which
instantly made me feel like a big ho. (But, you know, he
recovered
from his shock pretty quickly.)
And all I'll say from there is that after three days of being the butt-monkey for not only our architect members, but also my coworkers, I was just glad to be with someone who actually wanted to spend time with me, and it didn’t hurt that he kept telling me all night that I’m beautiful (well, you know, it was pretty dark in the bar and in my room, and he’d been out to sea for a while). And it reminded me that there’s another wonderful restorative besides nature and movies: 24-year-old men. Plus, besides all the other benefits, I got an excellent anecdote out of it. (The Night Train really caps it, don’t you think? Maybe I should give King Cobra another chance, see where it leads me.)
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