DRIFTING CLOUDS (72)

Directed by: Aki Kaurismaki

Starring: Kati Outinen, Kari Vaananen, Elina Salo

The Pitch: A Finnish couple - he a bus driver, she a maitre d' - lose their jobs and have to look for work.

Theo Sez: Slow and wistful, though just a couple of rather draggy scenes away from a mini-masterpiece. As ever with this director the unrelenting misery may be interpreted as deadpan comedy, though rarely as deadpan as it is here - when Kaurismaki has his hero walk out of a movie, demanding his money back because "it's supposed to be a comedy but I didn't laugh once", he may well be thinking of viewers misled by over-cheery reports of his own work (though, given said hero's unshakeably dour expression throughout the movie, it's a pretty funny line even in itself). It's actually an austere, melancholy piece, its humour mostly in the impassive distance between the film-maker and the ever-lengthening catalogue of disasters he visits upon his characters - like slapstick, it gets laughs by treating misfortune without the respect it usually demands ; you might mention Bresson or Jarmusch (both of whom get referenced through film posters adorning one of the scenes), but it's tenderer than either - it really loves its ugly-beautiful losers : if it weren't so restrained it might well seem maudlin. In fact the whole film - with its diffident tone and occasional, possibly deliberate amateurishness (a boom-shadow in one scene, crude lighting (with heavy shadows) in another) - is an ode to the blessed mediocrity of the common man. When, in a great scene about halfway through, a second-rate band plays in a dowdy restaurant that's about to close down, its middle-aged singer crooning that "My dreams never came true / But I'm not bitter" while all around him assorted have-nots and small-timers listen tearfully but expressionlessly - well, it just makes you want to go out and share a drink and a hard-luck story with everyone in the world.