Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatiana

Pidä huivista kiinni, Tatjana

Germany, Finland

1994

65 Min

Black and White

1.85:1

Russian, Finnish

Currently 3.8/5 Stars.
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SCR Aki Kaurismäki, Sakke Järvenpää

CAST Kati Outinen, Matti Pellonpää, Kirsi Tykkyläinen, Mato Valtonen, Elina Salo

SOUND Jouko Lumme

Cannes (Quinzaine des Réalisateurs), Toronto

Synopsis

Lugubrious Finns Valto and Reino take to the road in search of coffee and vodka, without which their lives are not worth living. But their reveries are interrupted by the arrival of garrulous Russian Klaudia and Estonian Tatiana — who are clearly interested in the two men, despite the language barrier. But what are the chances of getting a response from men who prefer staring at vodka bottles to talking? —IMDb

Director

Aki Kaurismäki

Aki Kaurismäki did a wide variety of jobs including postman, dish-washer and film critic, before forming a production and distribution company, Villealfa (in homage to Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965)) with his older brother Mika Kaurismäki, also a film-maker. Both Aki and Mika are prolific film-makers, and together have been responsible for one-fifth of the total output of the Finnish film industry since the early 1980s, though Aki’s work has found more favour abroad. His films are very short (he says a film should never run longer than 90 minutes, and many of his films are nearer 70), eccentric parodies of various genres (road movies, film noir, rock musicals), populated by lugubrious hard-drinking Finns and set to eclectic soundtracks, typically based around ‘50s rock’n’roll.

In the 1990s he has made films in Britain (I Hired a Contract Killer (1990)) and France (La vie de bohème (1992)). —IMDb