I Hired a Contract Killer

I Hired a Contract Killer. Aki Kaurismäki sells a pair of sunglasses to Jean-Pierre Léaud.

J'ai engagé un tueur / Ich engagierte einen Berufskiller / Ho affittato un killer / Я нанял убийцу.
    FI/SE 1990. PC: Villealfa Filmproductions Oy / SFI Svenska Filminstitutet.
    P+D+SC: Aki Kaurismäki. Based on the idea by Peter von Bagh. DP: Timo Salminen – 35 mm – Metrocolor – 1,85:1. PD: John Ebden. AD: Mark Lavis. Cost: Simon Murray. S recording: Timo Linnasalo. S editor: Jouko Lumme. ED: Aki Kaurismäki.
    C: Jean-Pierre Léaud (Henri Boulanger), Margi Clarke (Margaret), Kenneth Colley (Harry, the contract killer), Serge Reggiani (Vic), Nicky Tesco (Pete), Charles Cork (Al), Angela Walsh (landlady), Michael O'Hagan (Harry's contractor), Walter Sparrow (hotel desk clerk), Tony Rohr (Frank, doctor), Trevor Bowen / T. R. Bowen (department head), Imogen Claire (secretary of the department head), Cyril Epstein (taxi driver), Joe Strummer (guitar player, pub singer), Tex Axile (bartender at Honolulu Bar), Peter Graves (jewel seller), Ette Eliot (Harry's daughter), Roberto Pla (bongo player), Minna Virtanen (flower seller), Aki Kaurismäki (seller of sunglasses).
    M selections include: "Avant de mourir" (1926) / "Ennen kuolemaa" (Georges Boulanger), perf. Olavi Virta (1944). "Need Your Love So Bad", "Don't Play with Love", "Suffering with the Blues", "My Nerves", "Young Girl" and "I'm Sticking with You Baby" perf. Little Willie John. "Body and Soul" and "Time On My Hands" perf. Billie Holiday. "Burning Lights" and "Afro-Cuban Be-Bop" perf. live Joe Strummer. "Mi Buenos Aires querido" and "Cuesta abajo" perf. Carlos Gardel.
    Loc: London, England, UK: Holborn Viaduct, Portobello Road, 227 Westbourne Park Road, Silvertown: Cranbrook Point tower block, Dunbridge Street (Bethnal Green), Whitechapel: Winthrop Street, Mile End tube station, Kingsland Road (Dalston), Abney Park cemetery.
    80 min
    Festival premiere: 13 Sep 1990 Venice Film Festival.
    Finnish premiere: 12 Oct 1990, in Helsinki at Andorra 1, Nordia 1, released by Finnkino Oy with Finnish / Swedish subtitles.
    Digital transfer supervised by Aki Kaurismäki in 2014.
    2K DCP viewed at Filmmuseum München, 1 Feb 2020.

Having completed a series of films about Finland Aki Kaurismäki went international. I Hired a Contract Killer, his first film abroad, was shot in London. Aki commented: "People complain that my London looks like Finland. But Finland looks like that only in my films".

I Hired a Contract Killer is based on a traditional comedy theme: the man who fails even in suicide. To the cinema it was probably introduced by Max Linder (Le Pendu / The Man Who Hanged Himself, 1906). Charles Chaplin is often mentioned in the context of Aki Kaurismäki, but also Buster Keaton belongs to his favourites. Here one can mention Hard Luck, Keaton's interpretation of the theme of the chronically unsuccessful suicide attempt.

The most famous variant of hiring a contract killer to execute a suicide is Jules Verne's novel Les Tribulations d'un Chinois en Chine (1879, Voyages extraordinaires #19). An early Decla-Bioscop serial, Die Jagd nach dem Tode (1920) had loose affinities with Verne's story, as did the Robert Siodmak comedy Der Mann der seinen Mörder sucht (1932). Philippe de Broca finally filmed the Verne novel itself in 1965, starring Jean-Paul Belmondo.

Aki Kaurismäki was not inspired by any of them but instead by a British film, Last Holiday (1950), written and produced by J. B. Priestley, directed by Henry Cass and starring Alec Guinness. It is a film in a distinguished tradition, preceding Ikiru and Umberto D. In all of them an ageing protagonist has to retire and meets poverty and solitude; in Last Holiday and Ikiru he is told that he is terminally ill.

Cast in the leading role is Jean-Pierre Léaud. In The Liar, Opus number 1 in the Kaurismäki corpus, Aki played the title role in open homage to Léaud. While making I Hired a Contract Killer Léaud confessed that Aki taught him his métier again after a pause of 15 years in film-making.

The movie is an optimistic tragedy where Léaud interprets the knight of the sad figure. The romance is poetic and in fairy-tale mode. A point of comparison might be Broken Blossoms by D. W. Griffith. The flower girl may have been inspired by Charles Chaplin's City Lights.

From the soundtrack one can single out a key song, "Avant de mourir", heard in a recording from the year 1944 by Olavi Virta. The composer is Georges Boulanger: Aki's protagonist is called Henri Boulanger in homage to him.

Perhaps even more than The Match Factory Girl, I Hired a Contract Killer is strongly visual, telling its story in the language of images, maybe also because the social scene of London is for Aki not as self-evident as that of Finland.

Aki's films are counter-images to a period of consumer excess and what was called in Finland "casino economy". (The American counterpart, in a somewhat bigger scale, was discussed in works such as The Bonfire of the Vanities and Wall Street). In these and other films Kaurismäki is always on the side of the outsider, the marginalized and the lonely one.

Extremely laconic, compressed to comic book simplicity, yet complex, being reflected in Aki's hall of mirrors, or perhaps a dazzling Fresnel lens like in the film The Lighthouse by Robert Eggers.

(Based on my introduction at Filmmuseum München).

P.S. Brexit happened yesterday. In the screening there was a special charge in the story of a Frenchman in London. Nobody could fail to notice an affinity of the department head (Trevor Bowen / T. R. Bowen) with Boris Johnson.