Swedish critic Gunnar Bergdahl makes clear the cohesion between the films, the silence, the director, and the nation in a 1990 interview with Kaurism��ki. ���Should we see Ariel as a depiction of Finnish reality?��� asks the journalist. ���I take out a cigarette. I light it. Then the police arrive, and it���s over. That���s why I keep making my films shorter and shorter. Do you understand what I mean?��� replies Kaurism��ki. Here Kaurism��ki advocates narrative and visual concision; by showing very little, and including little dialogue, one empowers the spectator to read the film���s omissions and silences. Yet he also implies that the concision comes from a national mentality premised on the notion that verbal expression is a relatively weak form of social interaction, and moreover one ill-suited to social struggle, such as when the police arrive.

Kaurism��ki���s humour ��� except for the surreal farce of the Leningrad Cowboys ��� is characteristically deadpan in the extreme ��� a humour that is so acute and economic that laughter seems a superfluous extravagance. As a result, many have walked out of his films uncertain whether they have seen a comedy at all ��� His detractors may think he���s a joke, but then so do his fans ��� they feel he���s the best joke the art cinema has to offer at its own expense. These films are jokes about the seriousness of the art-house tradition by a man who reveres Robert Bresson, Carl Dreyer and Yasujiro Ozu; and jokes about the stereotype of the national character by a man who has made a career out of presenting himself as a the gloomiest of Finns (his own lead actors excepted) who ever stared into a glass of Koskenkorva, the national tipple

Jonathan Romney