Crime and Punishment

Antti Rahikainen, who works in a Helsinki slaughterhouse, shoots a businessman in his flat. The reason surfaces from three years earlier: the man killed Rahikainen's fiancee with his careless driving and walked free. A woman who sees the killing chooses not to go to the police. From then on Rahikainen is not pursued, he is worn down from inside. When another man takes responsibility for another death the road closes and Rahikainen turns himself in, receiving eight years. Aki Kaurismaki directed. It was his first feature. The source is Dostoevsky's 1866 novel Crime and Punishment, but the setting is present-day Helsinki rather than nineteenth-century Petersburg and Raskolnikov is renamed Antti Rahikainen. Markku Toikka plays Rahikainen, Aino Seppo the witness and Esko Nikkari the inspector on the case. Timo Salminen shot it and Veikko Aaltonen edited. It opened on 2 December 1983 and runs 93 minutes. It won best debut film and best script at the 1984 Jussi Awards. Anyone who knows Kaurismaki's later work will see the beginning of it here: characters who barely speak, a fixed camera, feeling carried without reaching the face. Who it is for: viewers who like Kaurismaki and the spare forms literary adaptation can produce. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a psychological interior. The novel does that for pages; the film says almost nothing.