Shadows in Paradise (1986)

This was part of a set of three movies by the same director, but after seeing this movie I had no desire to see the others.The box describes "Shadows In Paradise" as a romantic comedy. But the romance is lifeless and there are at best only a few mild chuckles. We don't really know-or find much reason to take interest in-any of the characters.The premise could have made a good story. Nikander is a middle-aged man who is now a garbage collector but used to be a butcher (but we don't find out more). Ilona is a woman who keeps losing jobs through no fault of her own, and steals her former employer's cash box out of revenge. They meet and have an on-again, off-again romance, and Nikander also rescues an unemployed man from prison and has him get a job as a fellow garbage collector. This man has a wife and child, though he says their relationship is unhappy.Unfortunately, everyone seems to be just going through the motions. Nikander has the same expression throughout the movie, as do most of the actors; aspects of the characters are mentioned but they remain undeveloped, and overall, there is no tension or excitement, and at a mere 75 minutes the movie seems overlong. The critics who praise it seem to be the sort who think any non-American film must be wonderful.

I am attracted to ambitious films, ones that challenge and that have a lot of powerful layered machinery. It is how I build my life.They are work. Art is work if you intend to collect and use it as fuel. So when you refine your notions about which films are worth the effort, you implicitly also make decisions. There are the films that aren't worth the precious time you have left, of course. But along the way you also find those films and filmmakers you can relax with. Instead of putting your whole soul on the line, you can just find a groove and relax.I only knew this filmmaker from 'The Man with No Past,' and that had a little too much bitter in the bittersweet. This is apparently his first film in that form. It isn't something he invented, but because he is Finnish, it may be the most effective distillation of it.There are two characteristics. One is the very careful flattening into two cinematic worlds. One is very straightforward: things are as they seem. People are no more than what you encounter: their inner selves are worn on their faces. You see all the way to the bottom. The encounters are simple, here we have simple friendship: two guys meet in jail. They are friends before the first one even wakes up to an offered cigarette. (There is more smoking in this film than I think I have ever seen.) There is the simplest reduction of romance, or rather the cinematic romance of the date movie. This always runs the risk of being cartoonish, or cloying, or even just boring, no matter how genuine. The second world is one of cinematic dreams, of what you really dream when you awake and think it was of love. It is highly economical, and deeply symbolic. A best friend of 25 years dies suddenly, someone we have invested in, someone with plans that will have formed the basis of the movie to come, we expect. Ten seconds and he is gone. As soon as we get the minimum information, almost as sparse as a Rockwell painting, we have a shot of a black dog running away under a garbage-strewn elevated road. That also is only a few seconds, but it gives us the shadows, the dream foundation, and is so richly evocative we instantly collaborate by filling in what we know from our dreams, the fears, sadness, disorder of death.In most filmmakers, this second world is shoved in your face and delivers humor, or perhaps some delivered allegory. And that is where the power of detachment comes in. Nordic people are famously flat emotionally, but among them, Finns are extreme. And is seems that among Finns, Kaurismäki is extreme. Both of these layers are presented in an Anti-Hitchcock fashion. The camera has no identity, makes no judgement, has no dreams.Both worlds are delivered with no emotional content and an absolute minimum of structure. All you do is pour in your own, which you can do, but only because there is a shadow layer that affirms dreams. I am tempted to say that the love story is the same, folding the foreground of the garbage collector and the dreams he has as the woman he falls in love with as instantly and effortlessly as every other raindrop in this film.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

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.

The foremost question is where there is here a paradise. Usually, the 30 - 40 years old Finnish men in Kaurismäki's movies look around 5o. They work hard, some of them night shift, in their scarce leisure time they sit in some bar drinking vodka and sometimes picking up a girl for a night or two. From Kaurismäki's movies, it seems that every man does do that, so that the patterns are also known to the women and therefore there is no need for further explanation. This is called Kaurismäki's minimalist style, and not seldom it leads to quite unexpected humor.Nikander (lit. "Victory-Man"), the protagonist of "Shadows in Paradise", is one of these losers, but with the exception that he wants to change his situation and thus had started to learn English early. Together with his older colleague, he plans to open his own business. One day, his colleague is killed during work by a sadden heart attack. Nikander meets shortly after the pretty Ilona one of whose specialties is loosing her jobs. Now they start an in- and out-relationship. Ilona comes back to Nikander whenever she is in trouble, this time she stole a cash box filled with money from the supermarket that gave her the notice because the director's daughter needed a position and an apartment.Marriage is always considered an arrangement amongst losers in Kaurismäki's movies. In "Ariel" (1988), Kasurinen and Irmeli just have two vacancies. In "Lights in the Dusk", the very beautiful Mirja, entering an almost completely empty restaurant, and sitting down at Koistinen's table, starts to speak very personally to him. When he tells her, they could now leave for a bar, then sleep together and afterward getting married, the two faces show no reaction. Is Paradise the reign or the absence of all bother, then paradise must mean, in Kaurismäkis movies the absence of any light that comes into the darkness of these losers, since this light could bring them down to a dark path.