markwood272 Some random observations: 1. Kaurismaki's "paradise" is grimy city streets, garbage, landfills, jails, flophouses, shabby apartments. Two kinds of people inhabit this Eden: either the few, the snooty, the well off – or the subverbal, poorly educated quasi-lumpen stumbling about among the aforementioned sites. The settings, both exterior and interior, belong more to the England of "The L Shaped Room" or "Billy Liar" than to the Scandinavia of travel agency brochures.2. Kaurismaki delivers virtuoso satire founded upon the stereotypical shy, wordless Finn. But he offers more by pushing beyond stereotype to display a deep familiarity with the kind of people he shows on the screen. An American director similarly so in tune with his people might be Kevin Smith. A possible British counterpart? Maybe Ken Loach.3. "Shadows in Paradise" is also a testament to Kaurismaki's confidence in the cinematic medium itself, in its power to tell stories using sight and sound without principal reliance on the material of theater or literature – words. We are accustomed to the many films about how XX meets XY, where the characters express feelings, establish plot, indeed, do just about everything through words. Sometimes we even get entire orations, regardless of a film's "realistic" intent. Dialogue rules everything from the quippy screenplays of Nora Ephron or Preston Sturges to the tangly Gallic word-webs of Eric Rohmer. The similarities between Ernest Borgnine and Betsy Blair in "Marty" and Matti Pellonpaa and Kati Outinen in "Shadows in Paradise" end with "Marty's" theatrical, dialogue-soaked provenance. It would be hard to transfer this film of Kaurismaki to page or stage. The story would weaken and likely die in print or any exclusively verbal form.4. For his comedy Kaurismaki employs a delay-deadpan technique, something familiar to anyone who has seen the "punishment" sequences in Laurel and Hardy's "Tit for Tat' (1935) or who remembers the standup routines of Jackie Vernon in the 60's. Kaurismaki's comedies – and "Shadows in Paradise" is a good example – prove the technique still achieves the desired result: laughs. And like Jackie Vernon or Laurel and Hardy, Kaurismaki makes his words just another ingredient in the comedy. They are well chosen and sometimes hilarious but enjoy no special preference.5. The movie screened the other night on TCM with the host's caution that this is an unusual sort of romantic comedy – but why the caution? And why the need for any "category" in the first place? To call this a "romantic comedy" and then warn people about its "quirky" or "offbeat"nature does it a double disservice. The warning for possible category transgression either implies that the film is deficient for disregarding certain "rules", or cautions the audience that it will be disappointed, since the movie does things it probably won't accept. But comedy, like so many things in life generally, thrives on surprise. In "Shadows in Paradise", Kaurismaki presents modern, free, prosperous Finland as a bizarre and rather dismal place which he proceeds to mine for laughter and the occasional tear. Whatever a television host labels it, the movie manages to be funny, entertaining – and accessible.6. A Kaurismaki movie has a distinctive "feel", as strongly trademarked as the comedies of Lubitsch or Sennett.

MartinHafer Nikander is a garbage collector. He appears about 35-40 and lives alone. Ilona is a woman who keeps losing jobs. The two of them, inexplicably, start dating even though you never have an idea what motivates them or brings them together. And, once they are together, they soon part--and the Nikander sulks....I think. That's because when Nikander (and Ilona for that matter) is sad he looks and acts exactly like he does when he's happy or bored or asleep. Will these two very dull people find each other before the film ends? Will anyone care?Imagine you took the film "Marty" or "Napoleon Dynamite" and sucked every last bit of energy out of them--then you'd have "Shadows in Paradise". "Shadows in Paradise" is a completely joyless film about two lonely people, who between the two of them, don't even have half a personality. As a result, they just seem to exist--and the viewer is stuck. Stuck because you cannot really care about them and stuck because the film seems to go on and on forever--even though it's only 72 minutes long. Why would the filmmakers choose to make such a film? It lacks heart...it lacks soul. Why?! Yet, oddly, this film is part of a set from the high-brow Criterion Collection.By the way, IMDb says this is a comedy and a romance. I saw no indication of either as I watched the film. Now had they said it was a zombie film, that I could have believed.

Polaris_DiB Aki Kaurismaki is like a Finnish Jim Jarmusch--deadpan and flatly paced, though in color and cut a little bit quicker. Shadows in Paradise shares a lot with Jarmusch's Stranger than Paradise, especially the first half, in that the existent romance between the leads is so undertoned it's almost invisible, and can break like gossamer. Nevertheless, also like gossamer, it's stronger than most people imagine and somehow the characters end up coming through to each other in the end. Though really, it's not like they had anything better to do with their lives, living in cold, muted, and poor Finland.In terms of plot points, there's not much. A garbage man dates a grocery store cashier, but their relationship is rocky from the beginning and hardly mutually satisfying. She ends up getting fired, and steals a cashbox from her former employer for revenge. This sort of forces the two together, though it's not like that makes their relationship really start--it's when the man gets beaten up and decides there's nothing else he really wants to do that he insists that they work it out. In the meantime, there's a lot of droll, flat Finnish activity and depression to look at.Even though it ends in the cruise it's far from an elated ending, and even in scenes where characters get mightily depressed and break up, it's far from depressing. Kaurismaki has an almost "Eh, it is what it is" philosophy about everything in this movie, and the dialog feels like it's subtle when in fact it's really amazingly direct, and all of the characters mean what they say.--PolarisDiB

Andres Salama One of Kaurismaki's earlier films, deals with many of his later themes, but without many of the later mannerisms that could be sometimes irritating, so what we had is something that is at times more fresh but also less polished than his later movies. As in many of his movies, Shadows in Paradise is an ironic (but ultimately endearing) look at the lives of Finland's working class. The late Matti Pellonpaa is a garbageman who falls in love with a supermarket cashier (a young Kati Outinen, playing a capricious, chain smoking, woman). Despite his outward macho demeanor, he's so painfully shy in front of women that it would take him half of the movie to declare his love for her. And when that happens, she's fired from the supermarket, and finds a new job in a department store. Pellonpaa then has to fight for her affection against the much richer store's owner. Worth seeing.