Aki's Aesthetics, Reivew on Lights in the Dusk

I've never seen a movie more stable than Aki. Each frame is like a thick still life oil painting, its color is rich and full, flowing with sad nostalgic thoughts, as if quietly shrouded in the fog of history, glowing with the unique light of ancient oil paintings. The close-up of its characters is still meaningful, the tip of the nose, the corners of the mouth, the forehead, the brow bone, the eyes, the cheeks... all are real and accurate. Aki's description of the face is pictorial, framing it with the aura of a candle and stroking the hair with the warmth of a kerosene lamp. The understanding of light makes him stand with the masters of the chiaroscuro style such as Caravaggio, van Honthorst and La Tour, and has his own, egoistic radiance.

It is this stable sense of form and structure of the picture that gives the tragedy of Aki's film a tearing pain. Behind his perfect composition, we see the frail, soulless corpses, the corpses of the working class. They are depressed. Passion never floated in their hearts, and the cry of resistance was like a fishbone stuck in their throats that could never be pulled out. They are the victims of society. In the face of class strife and economic oppression, they instinctively resisted (or rather, a survival-style escape), but unknowingly, they stepped into the depths of the strife step by step. Like the cold, crippling sunlight of Helsinki, Aki's characters are morbidly pale. They were devoured and bruised, almost lost themselves, dying in the stable picture structure Aki had constructed for them. From this, a strange feeling of division arises. You are sad, you are in pain, you are desperate, and at the same time you are pity and moved.

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