Ariel

The second part of Aki Kaurismäki's “Proletariat trilogy,” between Shadows in Paradise and The Match Factory Girl, Ariel (1988) was the film that first brought the Finnish director sustained international attention. A spare, deadpan tale of a working man's hard luck, it distils his style into something both bleak and quietly romantic.

Turo Pajala plays Taisto, the redundant miner whose journey south is a catalogue of misfortunes borne with the impassive stoicism that is the Kaurismäki hero's defining trait. The director shoots in his characteristic flat, frontal compositions and saturated colour, scoring the gloom to old Finnish tangos and rock and roll, and finding dry humour in the very relentlessness of his protagonist's bad luck. A tender romance with a meter maid, played by Susanna Haavisto, offers a flicker of warmth.

Critics abroad embraced its laconic wit and its compassion for society's discarded, and it became a foundational text of Kaurismäki's growing international cult. Terse, funny and unexpectedly hopeful beneath the deadpan, Ariel established the template for everything that followed — the worker-heroes, the retro jukeboxes, the refusal of self-pity. It remains one of the most accessible and endearing entry points into one of European cinema's most distinctive bodies of work. Pajala's impassive stoicism set the mould for the Kaurismäki hero, and the film's blend of hard luck, dry wit and stubborn tenderness announced a fully formed style that the director has honoured ever since.