Lights in the Dusk (2006)

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

The film was still a fun one that will make you laugh and have you leaving the theater feeling like you just stole something valuable and got away with it.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

Blistering performances.

Koistinen is a night watchman at a shopping mall in the Finnish capital Helsinki; he is treated with contempt by his boss and by his co-workers but he has a dream of opening his own security firm. It soon becomes apparent that this dream will never be realised when he goes to see his bank manager to arrange the necessary financing and it turned down; the manager thinking Koistinen is wasting both of their time. One day it looks as if things might be getting better for him when an attractive woman, Mirja, sits opposite him in a bar and after a short chat invites him to ask her out. Of course things can't be that good for him; she is just using him to gain the security codes for a jewellery store so the men she works for can rob it. They aren't content to just rob the store they also frame him so he ends up spending a year in prison; but even after all that he doesn't tell the authorities about Mirja.This film was nothing like I expected; it is film making at its most minimalist; there is almost no display of emotions and the settings are consistently bleak. Janne Hyytiäinen and Maria Järvenhelmi do well as Koistinen and Mirja; their characters may have zero chemistry between them but somehow it suits the cold feel of the film. Koistinen may not be the most sympathetic of characters but I found myself curious to find out what would happen to him and was ultimately pleased when the ending suggested that things might be about to get better for him. While this film lacks exciting action, laughs and likable characters it is worth watching if only because it is so different from typical Hollywood fare; also at seventy eight minutes it doesn't waste much time if it turns out you don't like it.

This is the story of Koistinen, Mirja and Aila. Koistinen is a night-guard in a modern business neighborhood in Helsinki. Besides doing his job, he has no contacts with other people except Aila at whose hot dog-stand he eats his daily meals. Secretly, he learns for economy exams in order to realize his dream to become a self-employed entrepreneur, but he does not really believe in his dream become true. Before and after work, he drinks, and this occupation helps him both to forget his desperate actual situation and to imagine a brighter future. The film is shot very darkly, and the task of the few lights is not to illuminate but to disclose - for the audience: Koistinen does not see. One evening, Koistinen's life seems to change: he meets the attractive Mirja. However, she is a gangster-bride, poisons his beer and steels his keys for the planned coup of her buddies. After the robbery, she returns to him and "wants to explain everything". Although Koistinen seems fully aware that he is cheated, he lets himself cheat, although he sees how Mirja hides the stolen keys and a few necklaces under his pillow, he just lets, what he thinks is his fate, go on. After Mirja left, he purposely awaits the police to arrest him in his apartment. He does not even defend himself.Never ever has despair better been portrayed in a more subcutaneous way - not only as a trip into the light, but as a trip through the light - the light out of the darkness, not the light as opposite to night.

I am not a fan of movies about people who live their lives in a pointless way, and when given the options to act sit like zombies and let the river of life float them downstream. People like this-our main character-are as interesting to me as those pieces of flotsam. I gather the Director is trying to say something deep about loneliness and isolation, but this movie is nihilistic garbage. What are we supposed to make of a man who, when given options to change his situation, simply sits and waits for the inevitable to happen? Whatever the movie is trying to say is lost in the aimless vapidity of the story, the long pointless scenes, the stilted dialog are all reminiscent of Robert Bresson's work, and he leaves me cold as well, as does Samuel Beckett.I'll let the artsy fartsy crowd giggle and moan and dissect this piece of crap.

When you get experienced enough as a filmmaker and you learned most of the tricks of the trade, you realise that the best thing to do for an art-house director is to stick mindlessly to whatever made you successful with the festival-going crowd and the film critics earlier. Never mind that you have no new ideas and that the most your film does is deliver the 'good old feeling' everyone expects.That's a fate Kaurismaki seems not to have been able to avoid with his Lights in the Dusk. Totally devoid of ANY new or creative ideas with respect to what we have seen from him before, Kaurismaki's feature recycles his lately trademark - and otherwise very appealing - darkish, yet basically cheerful coloured backgrounds and surroundings behind and around the actors. But the story is the most feeble ever... No real suspense, only mindless clichés about a totally hapless main character (no, this is not irony on the film's part, guys, this is just the 'good-old-Kaurismaki-feeling' we yearn for and it only seems to work because his other films were enjoyable on their own). Plus some sentimental music tossed in (who would have expected that from Kaurismaki? ;), without the real possibility for the viewer to relate to the characters (you feel no sorry, no empathy, only anger at most about how incapable they are).And finally, even at about 75 minutes, this movie is waaaay longer than it should be: another sign of running out of fresh ideas. Hey Aki, you'd better take a rest and come back with something that's more up to your standards. And my advice for the potential viewer: watch the other parts of the trilogy (The Man Without a Past, 2002; Drifting Clouds, 1996), and skip this one.