Shadows in Paradise (1986)

A little slice-of-life romance, in which two working-class Finnish people fall dispassionately in basic tolerance with each other. Their on-again-off-again relationship hits several hurdles as they realize that a relationship involves saying words out loud to another person on a near daily basis; a true nightmare scenario.

Calm piano jazz plays in the background throughout, sometimes broken up by a bit of clean 50s rock'n'roll. All smooth, all staccato, and all really nice. A piano man plays in the background of some scenes, others focus on his record player or the bar's jukebox. The soundtrack is forefront and intentional.

Mononomial Nikander, who refuses to ever provide his given name to his girlfriend, is a garbage collector who dutifully collects garbage, day in and day out, without complaint. It is a job, as any other job. His garbage collection partner dies, which is a minor drag, and he gets a new garbage collection partner who is shaped rather like Meatloaf. Meatloaf is no more communicative than the others, but a consistently reliable friend. They drink to excess, at the wrong times, for the wrong reasons. Alcohol is forefront and intentional. Cigarettes are probably just an element of the time, but they will collectively smoke about 20 packs before the film is out.

Nikander is checkin' out the checkout girl at the Grand Union. She's checkin' him out, too, I guess, but really they're both silently staring daggers at each other because their culture hasn't learned the basics of social interaction yet. He unceremoniously demands a date, she uncharismatically agrees, and he takes her to the most boring bingo parlor in Helsinki where they are bored in silence until she leaves, disappointed.

The next day she's fired, so she robs her employer and shows up at Nikander's place ready to run from the law. He accepts this as a good enough reason to get back together, and they go on an awkward little road trip before giving back the money.

The money is the point, though; just as stealing it brought them together, parting with it drove them back apart. Money is forefront and intentional. They are rejected from a semi-fine dining restaurant due to insufficiently fancy attire, forced instead to eat a kiosk tunnbrödsrulle over a trashcan. But the hammer really comes down when Nikander visits his girlfriend at her new job in a clothing shop, and the shop owner judgmentally tells her to keep her dustbin friends outside. She leaves Nikander without even bothering to proffer an explanation, and dates her boss instead.

Nikander is always calm and awkward, and verges on kind. The breakup shakes him up, and he puts on a new tough guy attitude. This actually seems to work – his girlfriend comes running back to him – but a couple of Swedish-Finns beat him half to death with a wooden plank. The girl is still around when he is released from the hospital, he and Meatloaf and the girl all grunt the friendliest grunts they can muster, and they hop on a communist cruise boat to Tallinn for their utterly aromantic honeymoon. Nikander and Meatloaf will meet again soon in a taxi in Jarmusch's Night on Earth.

While it is a romance story, and is intentionally parading around the stereotype of the absurdly asocial Finn, it's really the working-class slice-of-life aspect that has something important to say, at least now in 2025; it's a story about good, well-intentioned, hard-working men and women just getting through day-to-day life, and trying to get what they can out of it. It's neither a woe-is-me tale of economic struggle, nor a harsh commentary on class warfare, but a mostly true-to-life interpretation of what it was like to be a gainfully employed urban labourer in mid-80s Finland. Not great, not terrible.