There’s No Pleasure Like Playing the Victim

Albert Camus’s 1942 novel “L’étranger” (“The Stranger”) introduced the world to one of the first and most memorable in a long line of alienated heroes. The French-Algerian Meursault insisted on defining himself by the action — the killing of an Arab — that led to his execution. In accepting the responsibility, he asserted his own freedom.That self-assertion was also a refusal to be a victim. But alienation has changed a bit in the last 65 years. “Lights in the Dusk,” the third installment in what the Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki calls his “loser trilogy” (along with “Drifting Clouds” and “The Man Without a Past”), shows us a man whose existence is virtually coterminous with his victimhood — and who seems to like it that way.Koistinen (Janne Hyytiäinen) is a security guard in Helsinki who, for some reason that is never revealed to us, is held in contempt by his fellow guards. They pretend not to know who he is, and when a group of them go out for a beer they pointedly exclude him. He seems to have no friends outside of work, either. The only person who speaks to him is a woman named Aila (Maria Heiskanen) who serves him hot dogs from her wienie wagon.The underlying problem with “Lights in the Dusk” is that there is no apparent reason why Koistinen should be so lonely. He seems to want the fellowship of those around him, only to be rebuffed for no reason. He is a loser only because Mr. Kaurismäki needs him to be a loser. And then he chooses to be an even bigger loser — in fact, a spectacularly successful loser.One day a striking blond woman, Mirja (Maria Järvenhelmi), accosts Koistinen as if to strike up a relationship. They go out to a movie, a meal, and a disco together. Koistinen brags to Aila that he’s got a girlfriend.Mirja visits him at work and persuades him to take her, against regulations, on his rounds. She watches as he types in a security code at a jewelry shop. Then she puts a Mickey Finn in his coffee and steals his keys. Her accomplice, a gangster named Lindström (Ilkka Koivula), robs the jewelry shop, and Koistinen is fired.But he doesn’t tell the police anything about Mirja — just that he woke up in a car on the other side of the city with his keys missing. Even when Mirja visits him later and plants some of the jewels in his apartment to frame him for the robbery, he says nothing and goes to prison for two years.“Koistinen will never betray you,” Lindström tells Mirja. “He’s as loyal as a dog, the sentimental fool. It’s my genius to understand that.”Lindström also evidently understands Mirja’s loyalty to himself. She whines to him about what she is being asked to do to Koistinen by saying, “What do you want of him? He’s a complete loser. Why am I doing this?”“Because otherwise,” Lindström replies, “you’d have to work.”Subsequently, Mr. Kaurismäki adds a witty scene in which Mirja is seen doing the vacuuming in Lindström’s luxury apartment while he plays cards and drinks with a group of buddies.Meanwhile, the almost forgotten Aila writes and offers to visit Koistinen in prison. He tears the letter up unread. Aila’s loyalty to him is certainly unwarranted, just as Mirja’s loyalty to Lindström is unwarranted; this makes Aila the champion of the victims because she’s the only one not victimizing someone else.Is Koistinen’s canine and rather masochistic loyalty to Mirja, then, meant to be seen as distinctively feminine? Or is his spectacularly futile act of passive-aggression meant to be a kind of existential self-assertion, like Meursault going defiantly to his execution? Is it possible to assert your own existence by gratuitously sacrificing it?You be the judge, since the sacrifice is obviously intended to impress the audience rather than Mirja herself.One thing Americans will notice about this film is how much smoking there is. Everybody seems to smoke all the time — except for Mirja — and to look thoroughly miserable while doing it. Is this another way of courting disease, suffering, and unhappiness? Koistinen’s early encounter with some drunken Russians, eagerly talking about literature, may be meant to suggest that passive-aggressive victimhood should be seen as a Finnish national tradition.But there is a logical conundrum in the portrayal of Koistinen as a loser, since if he chooses victimhood, then he is presumably getting what he wants — which makes him a winner! That may be why Mr. Kaurismäki suggests in the end that Koistinen is prepared to cede the crown of martyrdom to Aila — which would, paradoxically, restore him to his place as the biggest loser of all.It’s potentially a Woody Allen-type comedy, but I don’t think Mr. Kaurismäki is laughing.

There’s No Pleasure Like Playing the Victim

There’s No Pleasure Like Playing the Victim

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