I feel all unintellectual, now, popping up to mention that I loved Till Lindemann in some clips of Amundsen the Penguin that I saw on youtube *^_^

La vie de bohème

http://timo.herd.fi/images/boheem1.jpg

http://timo.herd.fi/images/boheem2.jpg

Aki Kaurismäki, whose latest film Le Havre is currently doing its rounds, is a controversial character. Eccentric, uncompromising, and prone for deadpan jest, he often causes upproar in the Finnish press by either drunken twist steps on the Cannes red carpet, or giving interviews in which he approves of terrorism and wants the richest 1% of the population murdered.

However, there is no denying that he is a film-making genious. Movies like Man without a Past (nominated for Oscar in 2003) and Leningrad Cowboys go America (a road movie of a Russian rock band trying to make it in the US) are tremendous pieces of cinema despite their minimalistic style and scarce dialogue. For example the likes of Jim Jarmusch and Wes Anderson list Kaurismäki as their major influences.

In my opinion Kaurismäki's best film is La vie de bohéme (or Bohemian Life), an adaptation of Henri Murger's classic novel Bohemians of the Latin Quarter - the same novel which inspired Puccini's opera "La Boheme". The director himself says that the film is his way of rescuing Murger's work from the bourgeois fancies of the composer, and he certainly provides an adaptation much truer to the source material.

At its very basic, La vie de bohéme is a series of occurances in the lives of three failed artists: Rodolfo, an Albanian painter with no visa, Marcel, a playwright and magazine editor with no publisher, and Schaunard, a post-modernist composer of execrable noise. We see them solving crises such as obtaining food or presentable clothing (always in inventive and uncoventional ways), doing their utmost not to compromise their art or to sell out, and wasting their hard-earned money on a night of drinking, dining, and discussing art. There are numerous scenes that will stay with you, ranging from tragic to hilariously funny (like for example Schaunard's performance of hsi composition "The Influence of Blue on Art").

The casting is brilliant, with the Finnish actors Matti Pellonpää and Kari Väänänen providing excellent performances despite not knowing French, the language the film is in. André Wilms and Evelyne Didi fit their roles and the film perfectly, and even Rodolfo's dog Baudelaire is able to evoke emotions with his sad eyes - not to mention the great scene where he allows his meaty bone to be traded for a potato, so that Rodolfo can make soup for a girl he brought in.

A bittersweet dramacomedy, La vie de bohème will hardly make you laugh out loud. Rather, its dry, deadpan humour will paint a long-lasting smile at the corner of your mouth.

By the way, as luck may have it, the film is available on YouTube, complete with English subtitles: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFSqJER3e1k

Thanks to this thread i think i'll check out Carnage now. thanks RIPclass


The movie died -
"La vie de bohème (Bohemian ..." The YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated due to multiple third-party notifications of copyright infringement. Sorry about that. :oh:

i'l just throw this one on here in case somebody finds interest - http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/the-way-back/

That's how I saw it. I have the Giorgio Moroder version of it. I enjoy both, but the colorization was done well and I like the soundtrack.