Death in Helsinki

OK, let's say that life goes on. That's what the authors of Ecclesiastes and Murphy thought: "The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new." And Aki Kaurismäki seems to think so, too, in The Man Without a Past, a gentle, wistful comedy about being bludgeoned to death, then building a satisfying new existence for yourself in an abandoned shipping container.

Shot in both sound and color--elements that should not be taken for granted when Kaurismäki is behind the camera--The Man Without a Past reveals how rich the world can be, even when the screen-jolting red pours from your skull, even when the soundtrack's orchestral harmonies swell from a boom box that was wrested from you in the park, then turned up to cover the thuds of your mugging. If you're like the title character (Markku Peltola), you die soon after the attack. Or else you don't: You jerk upright in a hospital bed, stagger to the mirror (where you see yourself bandaged like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man) and then wander blindly to Helsinki's waterfront, where squatters rescue your paperless, penniless, amnesiac body.

For moviegoers who know Kaurismäki's work, what follows will fall into the category of the nothing new. So much the better. Each motif is as welcome as sunshine: the Finnish "rhythm music" (performed here by a Salvation Army band); the dust-mop dog (played by the suggestively named Tähti); the principal set, which resembles a 1950s cocktail lounge assembled from a junkyard; and the deadpan sarcasm against capitalists and cops, who at one point arrest our hero for the crime of having witnessed a holdup at a defunct bank. Most familiar of all in the Kaurismäkian scheme, and most welcome, is the romance between the hero and Irma, a Salvation Army foot soldier. Played with endlessly touching minimalism by Kati Outinen (The Match Factory Girl), Irma conducts her love affair by means of pauses, silences, blinks, stares, the mute proffering of various hand-held objects and a millimeter's worth of a smile.

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