La Vie de Bohème

Aki Kaurismäki's La Vie de Bohème (1992) took the Finnish director's deadpan sensibility to Paris, adapting Henri Murger's nineteenth-century stories (the same source as Puccini's La Bohème) into a timeless black-and-white comedy of artistic poverty. It competed at the Berlinale and is among the best loved of his films.

Matti Pellonpää, André Wilms and Kari Väänänen play the trio of hopeless bohemians, a painter, a writer and a composer whose grand artistic pretensions are matched only by their empty pockets. Kaurismäki shoots a Paris stripped of period markers, a city that could be in the 1840s or the 1990s, and lets his characters' shabby dignity and laconic friendship carry the film. His blend of melancholy, dry wit and sudden tenderness suits Murger's bittersweet material perfectly, and the great Pellonpää gives the film its soulful centre.

Critics loved its charm and its loyalty, under the deadpan, to the romance of the artist's life. La Vie de Bohème is funny and poignant, and in three failing artists it finds a tribute to friendship and stubborn idealism. This is Kaurismäki at his most affectionate, honouring a classic of French literature in a minimalist style that remains entirely his own. Pellonpää, doleful and gentle, is what most people carry away from it, and the film is as close to a love letter as Kaurismäki has ever written.