For every man hath business and desire..." (Hamlet, I,v) Hamlet as a cynical film noir set in the business world makes sense for the eighties, our time out of joint. Aki Kaurismäki's rendition is a resolutely deadpan spoof, consistently acerbic-and consistently hilarious. Visually, Hamlet Goes Business is a cross between George Kuchar and David Lynch-shot in black-and-white from every conceivable angle, and some we hadn't conceived of. Hamlet (portrayed by popular Finnish TV comic Pirkka-Pekka Petelius) is the scion of a wealthy Scandinavian business concern. A pouty, vaguely porcine young man, he is distracted by his variously malfunctioning appetites and dismayed by the angst of life on this barren reef ("I'd like to be like the others: a human being," he soliloquizes, "...but somehow I feel like puking all the time"). Hamlet seems oblivious to the power he inherits upon the murder of his tycoon father by his mother and his uncle Klaus; but Klaus and his trusted aide-de-camp Polonius have Hamlet's number: One. "He loves only himself," they observe. A robotic Ophelia (played by Shadows in Paradise's delightfully depressed Kati Outinen), absent-mindedly curling her eyelashes, is but one of the victims of the treacherous greed that permeates the film ("Better Hamlet's fortune should go to you than to some secretary," Polonius counsels her). Klaus' plan to close the concern's dockyards and factories-leaving thousands unemployed-in favor of the manufacture of a certain popular rubber product is the crime most foul perpetrated in this refreshing antidote to Hollywood's so-serious Wall Street. But...our fingers on our lips, for we have already told too much.