Don't you like it here?
2020-03-26 04:15Aki Kaurismäki's I Hired a Contract Killer (1990) is one of the most delightful neo-noir films I have seen in my life and I would say that even if it didn't open with a dedication to the memory of Michael Powell.
I can't imagine how that title escaped the notice of the pulp era, but the plot is straight out of Black Mask. After fifteen years of faithful clerking for Her Majesty's Waterworks, a parting shot of Thatcherite privatization leaves expendable émigré Henri Boulanger (Jean-Pierre Léaud) with nothing to show for his service but a gold watch that doesn't work and a state of anomie that does. We have already observed the routine of his life, so solitary, marginal, and transient that there are two numbers in his address book and the one that doesn't belong to his dead aunt belongs to the business that just fired him. He keeps a couple of potted plants on pallets in a makeshift roof garden. He knocks them over while trying to water them. His DIY attempts at felo-de-se are just as conscientious and hopeless, thwarted by shoddy construction and a gas strike. Inspired by a headline about Colombian drug wars, Henri takes his life savings to a criminal establishment in Whitechapel and purchases a hit on himself from an old-fashioned, businesslike gangster (Michael O'Hagan) who assures him that a "subcontractor" will get the job done within two weeks. Waiting around his drab, dilapidated flat to be murdered, however, is such a dispiriting prospect that it finally drives Henri for the first time to the none more English sodality of the local pub, where he drinks his first whisky, smokes his first cigarette, and falls in love almost at first sight with itinerant rose-seller Margaret (Margi Clarke), herself a drifting, displaced figure, short hair as punk-white as Henri's is umbrella-black. She leaves a rose-red lipstick kiss on his forehead, as if he were a mirror or a sleeping prince. And just like that, he doesn't want to die. "Because you met me?" Margaret queries in her gravely precise voice that never tips its hand to irony. "Yes," Henri exclaims as though it's obvious, "that's made me change my mind!" Too bad that the killer (Kenneth Colley) is close enough on his trail that he's had to flee first to Margaret's Brutalist tower block and then to a seedy residential hotel and there's no way to call off the hit, not with the Honolulu Bar demolished overnight in the wrecking urban renewal of the East End. All Henri can hope to do is evade his own death as long as anyone can, even when they haven't summoned it personally with £1000 in cash.
That's it, that's the movie. It's adorable. I had never seen anything by Kaurismäki that wasn't the concert film Total Balalaika Show (1994), so I cannot judge I Hired a Contract Killer against his normal Finnish oeuvre, but you might get something like it if you watched a bunch of Hammer noirs and snorted the complete works of Iain Sinclair. Or if you commissioned a neo-noir from Ealing Studios, specifically from Alexander Mackendrick, working in the nightmare mode of innocence askew of The Man in the White Suit (1951) and The Ladykillers (1955). Its London is full of edgelands and wastelands, a real-time document of post-industrial, pre-redevelopment dereliction all lit and shot by DP Timo Salminen—especially at night—with such flamboyant artificiality that its perfectly historical cranes and docks and garages and cobblestones and viaducts and tube stations and cemeteries look like sets and backlots, too carefully dressed and colored to be real. Its geography, too, seems oddly fractured, like the impossible city of Welles' The Trial (1962) where the Gare d'Orsay in Paris gives seamlessly onto the Palazzo di Giustizia in Rome. I would not be surprised if you really can't get there from here in a couple of shots of Henri's London. But what's there once you are? The waterworks office achieves Dickensian levels of clerical dystopia with its cavernous rows of gunmetal desks at which middle-aged men in monotonous suits labor silently over string-tied stacks of dusty papers accumulating even in the face of workplace death. It feels like a joke that Henri's flat is located on the tourist bustle of Portobello Road, because it's so peelingly subaqueous and vacant inside, especially as Henri sits up at night with his radio and his tea and biscuits and his brown-brick view of the airshaft, I've seen cheerier interiors in Edward Hopper. Margaret's at least has a fourteenth-floor panorama of the Royal Victoria Dock, but it too sinks into Eastmancolor noir after dark and a street sign bearing the tower's name of Cranbrook Point is affixed over the sofa as inexplicably as a stage direction. It is weirdly possible that the most normal-looking set in this film is the killer's own basement efficiency, simply because it gets a lot of natural light and at one point his teenage daughter (Ette Elliot) comes to visit and does the washing-up. To complete the dislocation, the soundtrack is almost entirely American blues and jazz except for the scene where Henri wanders into a daytime bar and the unappreciated house band is Joe Strummer. I would enjoy this conceit on its own tongue-in-cheek merits, but there's method in its mishegos: welcome to no man's globe. "Do you want to leave your home?" Henri asks as they contemplate fleeing the country in the wake of an additional complication of crime. Margaret answers with weary Marxism, "The working class has no fatherland." Everywhere might as well be nowhere when the past's torn down and the future hasn't been built yet. London is reinventing itself around them and its brave new redundancies have no room for awkward foreigners or girls with professions out of Pygmalion. As for going back where you came from, Henri has already revealed that he left France because "[they] said they don't like me there," a child's explanation with the absurd ring of truth. People that dispossessed, the only thing they can hold on to is each other, and it might be a bonding isolation in the grand tradition of They Live by Night (1949) or Gun Crazy (1950) except that nothing about I Hired a Contract Killer is so feverish, dreamy, or doomed. It's what James Agee once designated, in reference to the silent films of Buster Keaton, dry comedy. It's genuinely sweet that Margaret and Henri find and fall for one another among the brownfields and docklands of their unreal city; it happens so instantly and inconveniently that it can't not be funny. Such action as the film contains is so laconic, the title starts to sound less like hardboiled clickbait and more like one of Henri's transparent statements of fact. I don't even want to describe it as black comedy—it's not that edgy. It's just a deadpan, deeply endearing movie in which a couple of people die.
The question, of course, is which people, and the film isn't so affectless that we aren't concerned for Henri, caught between his newfound attachment to life and his scheduled separation from it. Whatever Léaud was like in the French New Wave, he's a minimalist revelation as the kind of man who leaves a polite note for his own murderer before heading to the pub; with his thick black hair and his long-nosed stoneface, he's as beautiful as a silent comedian and nearly as vocal, given far more often to looks of anxiety, chagrin, or resignation, as if the daily mechanics of the world were just a little out of his pay grade anyway. Before his unceremonious sacking, he pushes a spoon listlessly around his lunch in the office canteen while his co-workers chatter cheerfully with their server; when he nerves himself up to make eye contact, the corner of his mouth trembles so uncertainly, it can't even be called an effort at a smile, and he ends up staring through the fourth wall in mortification instead. He's eloquently dejected picking himself up from the debris of a failed hanging and his eyebrows after his first whisky double are a masterclass of physical comedy in miniature. "I'm sorry," he apologizes to Margaret, "I'm not used to talking." But his inexperience serves him surprisingly well in the underworld; he's strangely impressive entering the Honolulu Bar, a sudden silence falling around his small, straight-backed figure in its tightly buttoned black trenchcoat until he barks at the assembled villains, "Where I come from, we eat places like this for breakfast!" after which everyone relaxes, as if the proprieties have been observed. When he adds a pair of dark glasses—bought from the uncredited street-hawker cameo of writer-director-producer Kaurismäki—he looks far more like the cool, cinematic image of a hit man than the aging, arid-faced man we know is actually gunning for him. It doesn't make the killer look less deadly. If anything, the cadaverous weariness Colley had acquired by the end of his tenure as Admiral Piett has here desiccated almost to the point of undeath; his terminal smoker's cough leaves red stains on his handkerchief, like the old plague-borne association of vampirism and TB. He enters the picture from the withholding angles of a B-movie monster, a black-gloved hand, a shoulder in a pale raincoat, observed from behind as he studies Margaret and Henri through the nighthawk plate glass of the Warwick Castle, then suddenly he bursts into frame with a splintering crack of locks, leaving an ominous silhouette in the empty window of Henri's flat. Ubiquitous and inescapable, he might be Death itself when he tells Margaret with her basket of blood-red roses, "Nobody wants it, but die they must." Then by daylight we watch him ride buses and read newspapers, haunt his own marginal, solitary spaces and hear the bad news from his reluctant GP (Tony Rohr), and without any strain on the film's part it becomes possible to read this exhausted psychopomp as our hero's double as much as his nemesis. They dress in inverse layers of black and white. Their names chime, Harry and Henri. Harry even comes in for his share of slapstick as well as dry comedy when Margaret clobbers him with a vase full of water and flowers and he drops like a Keystone Kop. Inevitably, the contract killer and the man who hired him will meet in a graveyard, on opposing sides of an arch of graffiti and rubble that makes it clear that the neighborhoods of the dead are just as smashed-up and stranded as those of the living. You might get katabasis out of a setting like that. You might get chiasmus. You definitely get irony.
I don't know why Kaurismäki dedicated I Hired a Contract Killer specifically to Michael Powell any more than I know London well enough to read more than a few gestures of the film's psychogeography, but it did strike me—on top of the ordinary explanation that Powell had died earlier that year and it wouldn't shock me if Kaurismäki loved the films of the Archers—that you could double-feature it with Peeping Tom (1960) as much for the similarly grubby-bold expressionist palette as for any theme of killers and outsiders in a location-shot yet theatrical London. (It may be trivia, but I note for the record that Peeping Tom's DP Otto Heller also photographed The Ladykillers. I may have to rank him with Robert Krasker as a great documentarian-mythographer of cities.) In its own droll way, it might even share the romanticism of I Know Where I'm Going! (1945) or A Matter of Life and Death (1946) when it imagines that a chance meeting in a pub could be all it takes to recall a man from the brink of death-wish and reroute the course of his life. Then again, that sort of existential swerve is what good noir and neo-noir is all about. I had wanted to see this movie since 2007 and thanks to Robert Beveridge I finally got the chance; I wish I could point to an obvious home release, but the odds outside of Europe look sketchy at best. Catch it wherever you can, however you can find it. It ended up being exactly the low-key life-affirming film I needed to see right now. If you feel like seeing some beautiful dawn shots of docklands, Nicky Tesco as a late-'80's wide boy, or Serge Reggiani running a hamburger stand, it's that film, too. I am hoping it will not always look like a period piece that people take hold of door handles and make change with their bare hands. This deal brought to you by my transnational backers at Patreon.
I can't imagine how that title escaped the notice of the pulp era, but the plot is straight out of Black Mask. After fifteen years of faithful clerking for Her Majesty's Waterworks, a parting shot of Thatcherite privatization leaves expendable émigré Henri Boulanger (Jean-Pierre Léaud) with nothing to show for his service but a gold watch that doesn't work and a state of anomie that does. We have already observed the routine of his life, so solitary, marginal, and transient that there are two numbers in his address book and the one that doesn't belong to his dead aunt belongs to the business that just fired him. He keeps a couple of potted plants on pallets in a makeshift roof garden. He knocks them over while trying to water them. His DIY attempts at felo-de-se are just as conscientious and hopeless, thwarted by shoddy construction and a gas strike. Inspired by a headline about Colombian drug wars, Henri takes his life savings to a criminal establishment in Whitechapel and purchases a hit on himself from an old-fashioned, businesslike gangster (Michael O'Hagan) who assures him that a "subcontractor" will get the job done within two weeks. Waiting around his drab, dilapidated flat to be murdered, however, is such a dispiriting prospect that it finally drives Henri for the first time to the none more English sodality of the local pub, where he drinks his first whisky, smokes his first cigarette, and falls in love almost at first sight with itinerant rose-seller Margaret (Margi Clarke), herself a drifting, displaced figure, short hair as punk-white as Henri's is umbrella-black. She leaves a rose-red lipstick kiss on his forehead, as if he were a mirror or a sleeping prince. And just like that, he doesn't want to die. "Because you met me?" Margaret queries in her gravely precise voice that never tips its hand to irony. "Yes," Henri exclaims as though it's obvious, "that's made me change my mind!" Too bad that the killer (Kenneth Colley) is close enough on his trail that he's had to flee first to Margaret's Brutalist tower block and then to a seedy residential hotel and there's no way to call off the hit, not with the Honolulu Bar demolished overnight in the wrecking urban renewal of the East End. All Henri can hope to do is evade his own death as long as anyone can, even when they haven't summoned it personally with £1000 in cash.
That's it, that's the movie. It's adorable. I had never seen anything by Kaurismäki that wasn't the concert film Total Balalaika Show (1994), so I cannot judge I Hired a Contract Killer against his normal Finnish oeuvre, but you might get something like it if you watched a bunch of Hammer noirs and snorted the complete works of Iain Sinclair. Or if you commissioned a neo-noir from Ealing Studios, specifically from Alexander Mackendrick, working in the nightmare mode of innocence askew of The Man in the White Suit (1951) and The Ladykillers (1955). Its London is full of edgelands and wastelands, a real-time document of post-industrial, pre-redevelopment dereliction all lit and shot by DP Timo Salminen—especially at night—with such flamboyant artificiality that its perfectly historical cranes and docks and garages and cobblestones and viaducts and tube stations and cemeteries look like sets and backlots, too carefully dressed and colored to be real. Its geography, too, seems oddly fractured, like the impossible city of Welles' The Trial (1962) where the Gare d'Orsay in Paris gives seamlessly onto the Palazzo di Giustizia in Rome. I would not be surprised if you really can't get there from here in a couple of shots of Henri's London. But what's there once you are? The waterworks office achieves Dickensian levels of clerical dystopia with its cavernous rows of gunmetal desks at which middle-aged men in monotonous suits labor silently over string-tied stacks of dusty papers accumulating even in the face of workplace death. It feels like a joke that Henri's flat is located on the tourist bustle of Portobello Road, because it's so peelingly subaqueous and vacant inside, especially as Henri sits up at night with his radio and his tea and biscuits and his brown-brick view of the airshaft, I've seen cheerier interiors in Edward Hopper. Margaret's at least has a fourteenth-floor panorama of the Royal Victoria Dock, but it too sinks into Eastmancolor noir after dark and a street sign bearing the tower's name of Cranbrook Point is affixed over the sofa as inexplicably as a stage direction. It is weirdly possible that the most normal-looking set in this film is the killer's own basement efficiency, simply because it gets a lot of natural light and at one point his teenage daughter (Ette Elliot) comes to visit and does the washing-up. To complete the dislocation, the soundtrack is almost entirely American blues and jazz except for the scene where Henri wanders into a daytime bar and the unappreciated house band is Joe Strummer. I would enjoy this conceit on its own tongue-in-cheek merits, but there's method in its mishegos: welcome to no man's globe. "Do you want to leave your home?" Henri asks as they contemplate fleeing the country in the wake of an additional complication of crime. Margaret answers with weary Marxism, "The working class has no fatherland." Everywhere might as well be nowhere when the past's torn down and the future hasn't been built yet. London is reinventing itself around them and its brave new redundancies have no room for awkward foreigners or girls with professions out of Pygmalion. As for going back where you came from, Henri has already revealed that he left France because "[they] said they don't like me there," a child's explanation with the absurd ring of truth. People that dispossessed, the only thing they can hold on to is each other, and it might be a bonding isolation in the grand tradition of They Live by Night (1949) or Gun Crazy (1950) except that nothing about I Hired a Contract Killer is so feverish, dreamy, or doomed. It's what James Agee once designated, in reference to the silent films of Buster Keaton, dry comedy. It's genuinely sweet that Margaret and Henri find and fall for one another among the brownfields and docklands of their unreal city; it happens so instantly and inconveniently that it can't not be funny. Such action as the film contains is so laconic, the title starts to sound less like hardboiled clickbait and more like one of Henri's transparent statements of fact. I don't even want to describe it as black comedy—it's not that edgy. It's just a deadpan, deeply endearing movie in which a couple of people die.
The question, of course, is which people, and the film isn't so affectless that we aren't concerned for Henri, caught between his newfound attachment to life and his scheduled separation from it. Whatever Léaud was like in the French New Wave, he's a minimalist revelation as the kind of man who leaves a polite note for his own murderer before heading to the pub; with his thick black hair and his long-nosed stoneface, he's as beautiful as a silent comedian and nearly as vocal, given far more often to looks of anxiety, chagrin, or resignation, as if the daily mechanics of the world were just a little out of his pay grade anyway. Before his unceremonious sacking, he pushes a spoon listlessly around his lunch in the office canteen while his co-workers chatter cheerfully with their server; when he nerves himself up to make eye contact, the corner of his mouth trembles so uncertainly, it can't even be called an effort at a smile, and he ends up staring through the fourth wall in mortification instead. He's eloquently dejected picking himself up from the debris of a failed hanging and his eyebrows after his first whisky double are a masterclass of physical comedy in miniature. "I'm sorry," he apologizes to Margaret, "I'm not used to talking." But his inexperience serves him surprisingly well in the underworld; he's strangely impressive entering the Honolulu Bar, a sudden silence falling around his small, straight-backed figure in its tightly buttoned black trenchcoat until he barks at the assembled villains, "Where I come from, we eat places like this for breakfast!" after which everyone relaxes, as if the proprieties have been observed. When he adds a pair of dark glasses—bought from the uncredited street-hawker cameo of writer-director-producer Kaurismäki—he looks far more like the cool, cinematic image of a hit man than the aging, arid-faced man we know is actually gunning for him. It doesn't make the killer look less deadly. If anything, the cadaverous weariness Colley had acquired by the end of his tenure as Admiral Piett has here desiccated almost to the point of undeath; his terminal smoker's cough leaves red stains on his handkerchief, like the old plague-borne association of vampirism and TB. He enters the picture from the withholding angles of a B-movie monster, a black-gloved hand, a shoulder in a pale raincoat, observed from behind as he studies Margaret and Henri through the nighthawk plate glass of the Warwick Castle, then suddenly he bursts into frame with a splintering crack of locks, leaving an ominous silhouette in the empty window of Henri's flat. Ubiquitous and inescapable, he might be Death itself when he tells Margaret with her basket of blood-red roses, "Nobody wants it, but die they must." Then by daylight we watch him ride buses and read newspapers, haunt his own marginal, solitary spaces and hear the bad news from his reluctant GP (Tony Rohr), and without any strain on the film's part it becomes possible to read this exhausted psychopomp as our hero's double as much as his nemesis. They dress in inverse layers of black and white. Their names chime, Harry and Henri. Harry even comes in for his share of slapstick as well as dry comedy when Margaret clobbers him with a vase full of water and flowers and he drops like a Keystone Kop. Inevitably, the contract killer and the man who hired him will meet in a graveyard, on opposing sides of an arch of graffiti and rubble that makes it clear that the neighborhoods of the dead are just as smashed-up and stranded as those of the living. You might get katabasis out of a setting like that. You might get chiasmus. You definitely get irony.
I don't know why Kaurismäki dedicated I Hired a Contract Killer specifically to Michael Powell any more than I know London well enough to read more than a few gestures of the film's psychogeography, but it did strike me—on top of the ordinary explanation that Powell had died earlier that year and it wouldn't shock me if Kaurismäki loved the films of the Archers—that you could double-feature it with Peeping Tom (1960) as much for the similarly grubby-bold expressionist palette as for any theme of killers and outsiders in a location-shot yet theatrical London. (It may be trivia, but I note for the record that Peeping Tom's DP Otto Heller also photographed The Ladykillers. I may have to rank him with Robert Krasker as a great documentarian-mythographer of cities.) In its own droll way, it might even share the romanticism of I Know Where I'm Going! (1945) or A Matter of Life and Death (1946) when it imagines that a chance meeting in a pub could be all it takes to recall a man from the brink of death-wish and reroute the course of his life. Then again, that sort of existential swerve is what good noir and neo-noir is all about. I had wanted to see this movie since 2007 and thanks to Robert Beveridge I finally got the chance; I wish I could point to an obvious home release, but the odds outside of Europe look sketchy at best. Catch it wherever you can, however you can find it. It ended up being exactly the low-key life-affirming film I needed to see right now. If you feel like seeing some beautiful dawn shots of docklands, Nicky Tesco as a late-'80's wide boy, or Serge Reggiani running a hamburger stand, it's that film, too. I am hoping it will not always look like a period piece that people take hold of door handles and make change with their bare hands. This deal brought to you by my transnational backers at Patreon.
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