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 won the Finnish director sustained attention abroad. It is a spare, deadpan tale of a working man's bad luck, bleak in outline and romantic underneath, and it distils his style into its plainest form.

Turo Pajala plays Taisto, a redundant miner whose journey south becomes a run of misfortunes, each one borne with the impassive stoicism that defines the Kaurismäki hero. The director shoots in his usual flat, frontal compositions and saturated colour, sets the gloom to old Finnish tangos and rock and roll, and finds dry comedy in the sheer relentlessness of his protagonist's bad luck. A tender romance with a meter maid, played by Susanna Haavisto, lets a little warmth in.

Critics abroad took to its laconic wit and its compassion for the people society has discarded, and it became a founding text of Kaurismäki's growing international cult. Ariel set the template for everything that followed: the worker-heroes, the retro jukeboxes, the refusal of self-pity. Terse and funny, and more hopeful than its deadpan surface lets on, it is still one of the easiest and most endearing ways into a body of work unlike any other in European cinema. Pajala's stillness set the mould for the Kaurismäki hero, and the mix of hard luck, dry wit and stubborn tenderness announced a style that arrived fully formed here and that the director has kept faith with ever since.