Lights in the Dusk

[September 5th, 2007]

Nobody loves you when you’re down and out in Helsinki. That’s the example set by Koistinen, the graveyard-shift security guard who shuffles through Lights in the Dusk . His hours patrolling a deserted mall are downright companionable compared with the indifferent stares he gets everywhere else—at headquarters, at the local pub. At the end of the night he stops by a food cart—its neon sign reads “Grill,” but the only cooking device on hand is a rotating hot-dog warmer—where the woman at the window hands him a lemonade. She’s the only person who notices him.

Koistinen wanders through a cityscape that looks like Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks drawn with a box of Crayolas. He lives, in other words, in an Aki Kaurismäki movie. Lights in the Dusk is the third film in what the Finnish director has dubbed his “Loser Trilogy,” and Koistinen may be Kaurismäki’s biggest loser yet—quite a feat, considering the hero of 2002’s The Man Without a Past suffered from amnesia and lived in a Dumpster. But that man at least had friends, and a wry sense of humor. Koistinen, as played by Janne Hyytiäinen with a wounded scowl, can’t buy a shot of vodka without getting shoved behind a bathroom door. His attempts to rescue a neglected dog and get a bank loan are met with the same derision. (The loan officer asks him to exit out the back.) So when a pretty strawberry blonde (Maria Järvenhelmi, who looks like Veronica Lake gone slightly cross-eyed) starts showing Koistinen some attention, he doesn’t notice that she’s mostly checking out his security keys.

Meanwhile, I hope someone will notice this movie. The bloom has fallen off the fable-spinning formalism of directors like Kaurismäki, Jim Jarmusch and even Wes Anderson; what critics once saw as sweetly askew in their work is now suspected of being arch and self-conscious. So Lights in the Dusk hasn’t received the enthusiastic American response that The Man Without a Past did. It doesn’t help that the film is Kaurismäki’s bleakest. There are still touches of drollery—Koistinen’s second dinner date begins unpromisingly when he sets out an appetizer platter of bagels and peach liqueur—but as the title suggests, the film is a study of darkness descending. Individual shots are often held after the characters have moved away, so set pieces that initially seem whimsical (a half-drained glass of Jägermeister, that rundown frankfurter shack) fade into melancholy.

Kaurismäki’s sparse dialogue has a similar way of folding in on itself. Koistinen’s descent eventually leads him to prison, and after he serves his time, someone asks what it was like. “You couldn’t get out,” he says. The line is a deadpan joke, of course, but Kaurismäki lets it ferment, until it begins to sound like the epitaph on Koistinen’s life. He dreams of better things, but the look in his pale blue eyes betrays the suspicion that, in the words of poet Philip Larkin, “how we live measures our own nature.” The worth of Aki Kaurismäki is beyond question—and he proves it again here by showing that the only hope for fighting loneliness is not to get out, but to let others in.