In Mika Kaurismäki's Finland without borders, Berlin by night serves as Anytown, EuropaUSA, the axis on which Helsinki and Napoli meet-and the US and USSR converge as well. In an urban fairy tale-a fast-paced pastiche of the gangster film-a cigar-toting Sam Fuller, his white hair glowing in the dark night, is the Grumpy dwarf who leads his cohort Eddie Constantine in the pursuit of some stolen "snow white." Fuller gets all the good lines ("Talk, comrade, we're not from the Bolshoi Ballet") while Constantine, some twenty-three years after Alphaville, is no longer ruggedly impassive but softly mute...kind of Dopey. Rosso's sympatico Kari Väänänen is the Finnish taxi driver, Alex, who becomes caught up in the gangsters' long night, driving around Berlin with two French stiffs, a six-pack of heroin and a suitcase full of money in his cab while his Italian wife (Roberta Manfredi), a taxi-dispatcher, "keeps contact" via CB radio. At home with their infant twins and too-smart adolescent daughter is Grandpa Nino Manfredi, whose own long night's journey into day is spent in pursuit of wine. In a way, it's a family film, Alex shaking off his brood while his Russian-born pal Igor pursues in vain a prostitute, Mara, to have his babies ("even the pimps today aren't safe from family life," Mara laments). Mika Kaurismäki picks up where Wim Wenders (who has a cameo here, as does Jim Jarmusch), and Godard before him, left off in intimating a screen nation in which English is the Esperanto and Americans, French, Germans and Russians are all equally lonely and adrift. In Helsinki Napoli, home is an undercurrent-Igor, who lives in a houseboat, quotes Russian proverbs while Mara, who lives in the streets, wants "a kind of new-age pimp with feelings." Alex sums up the Kaurismäki hero's alien status with characteristically cloddish poetry when he postulates, "We are small potatoes, far away from home."