Watching Aki Kaurismäki's proletarian hero trying to make it through one more day brings to mind Buster Keaton-driving a convertible Cadillac in the snowy Finnish air, unable to get the top up; pulling said Caddy out of a garage that, incidentally, collapses behind him like the life he is leaving. Like much of Kaurismäki's work, this is a beautifully wrought, dark little film about a life of struggle, but here both film and life are obliquely illuminated by love. Taisto hits the road in the above-mentioned fashion when the Lapland mine he works at shuts down. Employment eludes him, thugs pursue him, but his luck shifts-almost imperceptibly but profoundly-when he meets Irmeli, a meter maid, and her lovelorn little boy. "Will you disappear in the morning?" she asks. "No. We'll be together forever," he replies. And you know they will-that's Kaurismäki's brand of minimalism. There is no point, and no way, to aggrandize these lives, so Kaurismäki parodies the pedal-to-the-metal road movie and all manner of dramatic narrative, offering instead a progression of scenes, each with its own integrity, each with a measurable intensity.