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Up today, my latest Humanists column<\/a> for 3Quarksdaily on Aki Kaurism\u00e4ki\u2019s La Vie de Boh\u00e8me<\/em>:<\/p>\n Do even lovers of world cinema think much about Finland\u2019s working class? Does Aki Kaurism\u00e4ki think about much else? Clearly, when not thinking about Finland\u2019s working class, he thinks about world cinema, even going so far as to produce a short film<\/a> thanking Yasujir\u014d Ozu<\/a> for his influence. \u201cSo far I\u2019ve made eleven lousy films,\u201d the Finn says to a pair of portraits of the Japanese master, \u201cand I\u2019ve decided to make another thirty, because I refuse to go to my grave until I have proved to myself that I\u2019ll never reach your level, Mr. Ozu.\u201d<\/p>\n But Kaurism\u00e4ki has<\/em> reached Ozu\u2019s level, at least by one particularly objective measure: drinking. Both filmmakers have gone on record measuring out their lives by number of glasses and bottles emptied. While Ozu and his collaborator K\u014dgo Noda might famously have put away 180 liters of sake in the process of writing each and every script, their films usually focused on characters who might only indulge in a couple rounds after work. Ozu\u2019s people tend to operate under a slow but steady upward mobility, albeit one that sends subtly devastating waves through their long-established but delicate familial relationships. Kaurism\u00e4ki\u2019s people, who might easily drink instead of working, can count themselves lucky to have any kind of relationships at all.<\/p>\n In Finland as Kaurism\u00e4ki uses it, you might just as well call the working class the drinking class. When he leaves his homeland for La Vie de Boh\u00e8me<\/em>, a part of that simple formula goes missing: the French playwright Marcel, the Albanian painter Rodolfo, and the Irish composer Schaunard want to create and want to find women, but above all, they want not to work. At the point the film begins, getting jobs seems to have transcended the position of priority in their lives to become the unquestioned foundational principle of<\/em> their lives. Though neither successful nor prosperous by any common definitions of the words, they nevertheless hold themselves up higher than, say, the still-teetering wreckages in the Kaurism\u00e4ki-influenced Helsinki segment of Jim Jarmusch\u2019s Night on Earth<\/em><\/a>. As members of what you could call the non-working class, they skirt the standard set of human obligations with a kind of… style<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n