Aki Kaurismäki has in the past given us wonderfully sardonic postmodern renditions of Dostoevsky and Shakespeare. His goal in La Vie de bohème is to wrest Henri Murger's 1851 novel from the clutches of Puccini's opera and its bourgeois preconceptions and create a film that is mockingly true to the spirit of the novel-a film about survival, economic and artistic. It is set and shot in contemporary Paris (on locations seemingly unchanged since the time of the novel), with a soundtrack combining Tchaikovsky with punk rock and blues, and a linguistic melange in which "the vulgarity of rustic speech combines with skillful sentences that might have been turned on Cyrano's lathe" (AK). Anyone who knows Kaurismäki's work knows the depths to which the story's three passionate male artists will go as they fight off landlords, immigration officials, and assorted Philistines and pursue their respective muses and tragic romances. In this La Bohème the girlfriends actually work for a living, but, as Amy Taubin notes, sadly, Kaurismäki does not answer Sally Potter's question posed in Thriller-"Why did Mimi have to die?"