Eight Films From the Brothers Kaurismaki : SPECIAL SCREENINGS : Eight-Film Offering at UCLA Finland’s Kaurismaki Brothers

The UCLA Film and Television Archive is presenting eight films from Finland’s Kaurismaki brothers from Thursday through March 11 at Melnitz Theater. If the first two films, Mika Kaurismaki’s “Rosso” (1985) and Aki Kaurismaki’s “Crime and Punishment” (1983), are any indication, we’re in for a treat.

“Rosso” is a knockout, pure and simple, and was a record-setter at Finnish box offices. A Sicilian hit man, Giancarlo Rossi (Kari Vaananen, a top Finnish star who speaks Italian throughout), is ordered to go to Finland to assassinate a Finnish woman whom he soon realizes is the beauty who had been his summer lover.

(We don’t know why there’s a contract out on her, and Rosso doesn’t either.)

From this romantic premise, Mika Kaurismaki spins an ironic and unpredictable fable of destiny in the form of a road movie that’s more Wim Wenders than Hollywood. It develops with a sly sense of the absurd that recalls Eastern European comedy at its darkest, a quality underlined by flourishes of a small-town brass band. The film also recalls Werner Schroeter’s “Palermo or Wolfsburg” in its depiction of a Sicilian adrift in a society as cold as its climate.

Aki Kaurismaki’s “Crime and Punishment,” which marked a notably ambitious and successful directorial debut, is as free an adaptation of Doestoevsky as it is inspired. It’s a far more somber film than “Rosso,” but it builds considerable low-key power and is imbued with the same sense of existentialist fatalism as “Rosso.”

A lean, sullen young man with thinning long hair (Markku Toika), once a law student, now a Helsinki slaughterhouse worker, shoots down a middle-aged man in his elegant apartment. His motive is different from that of Raskolnikov, and there is also a witness, a young woman who finds herself unable to give him away to the police. Intact from the original is the cat-and-mouse skirmishing between a police inspector who hasn’t enough evidence to nail the killer, who in turn baits him, but Aki Kaurismaki develops his own concerns in his own style.

Both the Kaurismakis are film makers with a keen sense of discovery, and in their respective films, we’re left feeling that we’ve been taken on a shrewdly observed, thoroughly detailed journey into the unpredictable territory of the human heart and life itself.

Information: (213) 206-FILM, 206-8013.