Aki Kaurismäki's Proletariat Trilogy

As they say, if you're going to buy only one trilogy of offbeat films from Finland, make it this one. Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki burst on to the international film scene in the early 1980s with his unique brand of sad-sack comedies (that brought new meaning to the word “deadpan”), presented with a no-frills yet intriguingly precise visual style in tales of working-class outcasts on the fringes of society. Although Kaurismäki didn't specifically plan to make a trilogy, during the filming of 1990's The Match Factory Girl he announced that it was the final film in a trio that began with Shadows in Paradise (1986) and continued with Ariel (1988), a body of work that Kaurismäki whimsically stated was “dedicated to the memory of Finnish reality.” Each of these short features effectively combines sardonic humor and downbeat tragedy in a post-industrial, pre-Internet world. But even though Kaurismäki's characters are downbeat, they are not downtrodden: from the unlikely romance between a trash collector and a cashier in Shadows in Paradise to the cash-strapped miner looking for love in Ariel to the lonely revenge of The Match Factory Girl, each of these films offers an emotionally detached yet amiably humanitarian look at losers who haven't given up, even when life seems to be urging them to do so. Kaurismäki's curiously engaging low-key comedies put an agreeable spin on Hollywood conventions, from romantic comedy to film noir to classic revenge melodrama in a working-class environment where smiles are rare, fate is cruel, and vintage rock ‘n roll is the soundtrack of life. Presented as part of the Criterion Collection's no-frills Eclipse line, this set is highly recommended. (J. Shannon)