81 min | NR | November 17, 2023 | Mubi
Two lonely Helsinki workers meet at a karaoke bar and try to build something out of bad luck and worse habits. Aki Kaurismäki strips romance down to glances, jukebox songs, and a stray dog. It is the warmest film ever made about people who can barely speak.
Ansa stocks shelves at a Helsinki supermarket until a manager fires her for taking expired food. Holappa does manual labor between drinking binges that cost him every job he holds. They meet at a karaoke bar and exchange almost no words. The film tracks the small distance between two people who want connection and keep failing to close it. The real subject is loneliness in a Finland that runs on shift work, cheap beer, and a radio that never stops reporting the war next door.
Alma Pöysti plays Ansa with a stillness that holds decades of disappointment behind a flat expression. She lets one small smile carry the weight of an entire courtship. Jussi Vatanen plays Holappa as a man drowning slowly and aware of it. He delivers his lines in the same dry register whether he is flirting or being fired. Janne Hyytiäinen plays Holappa’s coworker Huotari with a hangdog loyalty that supplies most of the film’s comedy. Nuppu Koivu plays Ansa’s friend Liisa as the one character who seems comfortable in her own skin.
Aki Kaurismäki writes and directs in the deadpan style he has refined for forty years. The production design saturates drab rooms with blocks of pure color. A yellow wall, a red coat, and a green door turn a worker’s flat into something close to a painting. The compositions stay static and frontal, and the actors hold their positions like figures in a tableau. Kaurismäki scores the bleakness with old rockabilly and tango records that the characters play on jukeboxes and radios. The Russian war bulletins on the radio fix the story in the present while the rest of the frame looks like 1962.
Kaurismäki makes comedy and despair from the same flat surface. Nothing in the film raises its voice. The jokes land in the pauses and the romance advances by inches. This is a movie about the stubbornness it takes to keep reaching for another person after life has trained you to expect nothing. It finds enormous feeling in characters who refuse to show any. The result is tender without a trace of sentiment.