framptonhollis Various visuals in "Shadows in Paradise" manage to speak more than thousands of words. In the spirit of "L'Atalante" and "Marty", "Shadows in Paradise" is a poignant love story that chronicles two likable characters' miraculous, romantic, and conflict-infested relationship. It combines the hilarious with the melancholic in a way that director Aki Kaurismäki had proved to master time and time again. His juggling of emotions is bathed in stark realism that lies within the film's colorful visuals. The lead characters are not played by glamorous Hollywood stars, these characters are not the stereotypical fools usually present in romantic comedies. They are real, but still quite interesting, human beings. In the spirit of writers like James Joyce and filmmakers such as Charles Burnett, Kaurismaki finds beauty in everyday moments and people. While there are moments of fierce conflict in this film that can, in no way, be called "mundane", a vast majority of what occurs in "Shadows in Paradise" is highly normal and borderline bland. However, through these slight details, Kaurismaki is able to explore the depths of the human experience, as well as the hidden beauty within the everyman. This sweet, gentle, and darkly comic love story will impress both romantics and film critics.

Sindre Kaspersen Finnish writer and director Aki Kaurismaki's third feature film is the first in his trilogy about the Finnish working-class which was succeeded by "Ariel" (1988) and "The Match Factory Girl" (1990). It tells the story of middle-aged garbage driver Nikander who is approached one day at work by his colleague who has decided that he refuses to end his days behind the steering wheel. Nikander's friend presents him with an idea about starting an own company and wants him as his partner. Nikander likes the idea, but when his friend dies from a heart attack the following day, Nikander loses his faith. Nikander continues his days with driving garbage and attending an English course until the day he spots cashier lady IIona. Nikander invites her out on a date, but she loses interest in him when he brings her along to play bingo. Nikander proceeds with his ritualistic life, but the day IIona is fired from her job he receives a call which reimburses his faith. IIona wants to go to Helsinki and together they embark on a trip towards brighter prospects.Finnish director Mika Kaurismaki's little brother Aki Kaurismäki, one of Europe's greatest and most original filmmakers, has created a distinctly innovating and minimalistic style of filmmaking with films such as "I Hired A Contract Killer" (1990), "Drifting Clouds" (1996) and "The Man Without A Past" (2002). His low-keyed, stringently structured and bittersweet films are characterized by few characters, minimal dialog, dry and sarcastic humor and a language which without exception is standard Finnish. The genius with Aki Kaurismäki is that through his remarkable stories he manages to clarify the precious value of humor. This Finnish production which was produced by Aki Kaurismäki's older brother Mika Kaurismäki is a subtle and simple story about two love seeking human beings who due to their modest nature is distanced from one another and who creates unnecessary obstacles for one another. They both have hopes and dreams of a greater and better life, but their ideals are repeatedly challenged by faith's unpredictable intervention.The directing, the cinematography, the film editing, the narrative, the dialog, the atmosphere, the pace and the very realistic milieu depictions is in accordance with Aki Kaurismäki's usual style in this acute comedy drama about everyday life, interpersonal relations, identity, love and the Finnish working-class during the late 1980s. The acting performances by the director's frequent collaborators Kati Outinen and Matti Pellonpää (1951-1995) is marvellous and their characters' colorful personalities creates a fine contrast to the films underlying melancholy. This character-driven and dialog-driven joy spreader which gained the award for Best Film at the Jussi Awards in 1987 presents the viewers to an incomparable cinematic universe and it is an unconventional and romantic fable with a great heart and a poetry of faith that is drifting through the gray toned shadows which rests above Aki Kaurismäki's rare paradise.

tedg I am attracted to ambitious films, ones that challenge and that have a lot of powerful layered machinery. It is how I build my life.They are work. Art is work if you intend to collect and use it as fuel. So when you refine your notions about which films are worth the effort, you implicitly also make decisions. There are the films that aren't worth the precious time you have left, of course. But along the way you also find those films and filmmakers you can relax with. Instead of putting your whole soul on the line, you can just find a groove and relax.I only knew this filmmaker from 'The Man with No Past,' and that had a little too much bitter in the bittersweet. This is apparently his first film in that form. It isn't something he invented, but because he is Finnish, it may be the most effective distillation of it.There are two characteristics. One is the very careful flattening into two cinematic worlds. One is very straightforward: things are as they seem. People are no more than what you encounter: their inner selves are worn on their faces. You see all the way to the bottom. The encounters are simple, here we have simple friendship: two guys meet in jail. They are friends before the first one even wakes up to an offered cigarette. (There is more smoking in this film than I think I have ever seen.) There is the simplest reduction of romance, or rather the cinematic romance of the date movie. This always runs the risk of being cartoonish, or cloying, or even just boring, no matter how genuine. The second world is one of cinematic dreams, of what you really dream when you awake and think it was of love. It is highly economical, and deeply symbolic. A best friend of 25 years dies suddenly, someone we have invested in, someone with plans that will have formed the basis of the movie to come, we expect. Ten seconds and he is gone. As soon as we get the minimum information, almost as sparse as a Rockwell painting, we have a shot of a black dog running away under a garbage-strewn elevated road. That also is only a few seconds, but it gives us the shadows, the dream foundation, and is so richly evocative we instantly collaborate by filling in what we know from our dreams, the fears, sadness, disorder of death.In most filmmakers, this second world is shoved in your face and delivers humor, or perhaps some delivered allegory. And that is where the power of detachment comes in. Nordic people are famously flat emotionally, but among them, Finns are extreme. And is seems that among Finns, Kaurismäki is extreme. Both of these layers are presented in an Anti-Hitchcock fashion. The camera has no identity, makes no judgement, has no dreams.Both worlds are delivered with no emotional content and an absolute minimum of structure. All you do is pour in your own, which you can do, but only because there is a shadow layer that affirms dreams. I am tempted to say that the love story is the same, folding the foreground of the garbage collector and the dreams he has as the woman he falls in love with as instantly and effortlessly as every other raindrop in this film.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

hasosch The foremost question is where there is here a paradise. Usually, the 30 - 40 years old Finnish men in Kaurismäki's movies look around 5o. They work hard, some of them night shift, in their scarce leisure time they sit in some bar drinking vodka and sometimes picking up a girl for a night or two. From Kaurismäki's movies, it seems that every man does do that, so that the patterns are also known to the women and therefore there is no need for further explanation. This is called Kaurismäki's minimalist style, and not seldom it leads to quite unexpected humor.Nikander (lit. "Victory-Man"), the protagonist of "Shadows in Paradise", is one of these losers, but with the exception that he wants to change his situation and thus had started to learn English early. Together with his older colleague, he plans to open his own business. One day, his colleague is killed during work by a sadden heart attack. Nikander meets shortly after the pretty Ilona one of whose specialties is loosing her jobs. Now they start an in- and out-relationship. Ilona comes back to Nikander whenever she is in trouble, this time she stole a cash box filled with money from the supermarket that gave her the notice because the director's daughter needed a position and an apartment.Marriage is always considered an arrangement amongst losers in Kaurismäki's movies. In "Ariel" (1988), Kasurinen and Irmeli just have two vacancies. In "Lights in the Dusk", the very beautiful Mirja, entering an almost completely empty restaurant, and sitting down at Koistinen's table, starts to speak very personally to him. When he tells her, they could now leave for a bar, then sleep together and afterward getting married, the two faces show no reaction. Is Paradise the reign or the absence of all bother, then paradise must mean, in Kaurismäkis movies the absence of any light that comes into the darkness of these losers, since this light could bring them down to a dark path.