Shadows in Paradise (Aki Kaurismäki, 1986)

Kati Outinen and Matti Pellonpää in Shadows in Paradise

Nikander: Matti Pellonpää
Ilona Rajmäki: Kati Outinen
Melartin: Sakari Kousmanen
Co-worker: Esko Nikkari
Ilona's Girlfriend: Kylli Köngäs
Shop Steward: Pekka Laiho

Director: Aki Kaurismäki
Screenplay: Aki Kaurismäki
Cinematography: Timo Salminen

Glumly smoking their lungs out, a garbage collector and a supermarket clerk embark on a ploddingly passionless relationship -- their first date, to her disgust, is at a bingo parlor -- in Aki Kaurismäki's Shadows in Paradise. Don't look too hard for paradise: It's no more in evidence in Kaurismäki's film than in his friend Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise (1984), unless Talinn, the Estonian capital toward which the couple set sail on a Soviet liner at the end of the film, is their idea of heaven. It's hard to think of a film as both authentic and ironic, but Kaurismäki and his actors manage to make their characters both convincing and, in a very low-key way, funny. It took me a while, to be sure, to catch on to the tone of the film: I had never seen one of Kaurismäki's before, and coming cold to its gray Helsinki cityscape and its entirely unprepossessing leads -- Outinen and Pellonpää are by far the homeliest performers in the film -- I wasn't sure whether the twinges of mirth I felt at their solemn, dogged worldview was appropriate. For that matter, I'm still not sure --- which is one of the reasons I find the film so interesting.