TAKE CARE OF YOUR SCARF, TATJANA! (66)

Directed by: Aki Kaurismaki (1993)

Starring: Matti Pellonpaa, Mato Valtonen, Kati Outinen

The Pitch: A Finnish road-movie : a pair of losers in a broken-down car pick up (or are picked up by) a couple of Russian tourists.

Theo Sez: An amusing diversion, little more than an hour long and minimalist to the point of abstraction - the kind of film where everyone looks dour, the camera never moves, and a couple's small show of affection feels as momentous as tearing each other's clothes off (she lays her head on his shoulder, he puts an arm around her - cue great swells of impassioned music). It's all done, of course, for comic effect, and this is a quintessential slice of Kaurismaki's deadpan, shaggy-reindeer kind of humour - a typical shot has our two gloomy heroes sitting across from each other drinking steadily for a good 20 seconds, then putting their drinks down at exactly the same moment (it's funnier than it sounds). The general air of self-deprecation can easily obscure the film's very real accomplishments - both in its delicately-lit black-and-white images and as a sly little comedy of sexual repression (chief characteristic, on this evidence, of the Finnish male) : when lugubrious man-mountain Valtonen - ineffectual, mother-dominated and laconic to the point of pathology - wordlessly watches chirpy, clean-cut popsters The Renegades on TV, singing Leiber and Stoller ("Ah'm a red-blooded boy / And I can't stop thinkin' about / Girls, girls, girls"), we've gone beyond minimalist doodling to something far more complicated ; and a little sad.