Kaurismäki’s film is a pitch perfect homage to cinema’s silent era. Essentially a three hander, it reminds the viewer of the virtues of simplicity and clarity in story-telling, virtues which permit the filmmaker to therefor indulge his or her chosen whims. The highly limited use of dialogue means an additional emphasis on shot composition and score. It also reminds us that cinema is an inherently technical art, involving the juxtaposition of artificial moments. The sum of these juxtaposed moments is greater than the whole. Kaurismäki seems to delight in flirting with the ridiculous and still succeeding in cooking up pathos from his morality fable, adapted from a classic work of nineteenth century Finnish literature written by Juhani Aho.
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