For more than 30 years, Aki Kaurismäki (Drifting Clouds, Le Havre) has crafted lucid fables about people with everyday struggles, including artists, laborers and immigrants. He portrays marginalized outcasts with a detached tragi-comic tenderness: these are his people. Kaurismäki's latest, a masterful distillation of prior themes, emerges as a somber romantic comedy. The down-on-his-luck Holappa (the acclaimed actor Jussi Vatanen) and the sensitive supermarket cashier Ansa (the radiant Alma Pöysti), two quiet loners, spot each other in a bar and then go to a movie together. Accidents, alcohol and their own vulnerabilities keep Ansa and Holappa apart. Will the persistence of desire draw them back together? Cinematographer Timo Salminen paints the film's bars, factories and rain-drenched streets in memorably saturated colors; Pöysti's clear-eyed, sensitive gaze takes the movie straight into our hearts. Courtesy of Variance 

D: Aki Kaurismäki, FIN, subtitled, 2023, 1h21m

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