"Midway in the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost." Fueled by quotes from Dante, Rosso is a gangster film cum road movie that sends its Sicilian hero on a spiral from purgatory to Helsinki and beyond. Rosso (Kari Väänänen), a fallen-down Mafia hitman, is ordered from Sicily to Finland on a mission: to murder the Finnish woman, Marja, he once loved. (In concept, it is a fate worthy of Alberto Sordi's hapless assassin in Mafioso.) Discovering that Marja has moved to a remote area in western Finland, Rosso, joined by Marja's amiably naive brother, sets out to find her. Each speaking his own language, they form a curious partnership as they explore the oddities of rural Finland in a beat-up American sedan, pursued by unnamed assailants and heading toward the end of the earth. Or so the desolate landscapes of the filmmaker's homeland appear when viewed through the eyes of a saddened Sicilian: the Antonioniesque bleakness seems to come out and grab him. It is Finland, Italian style. Even here, the Mafia functions as a kind of inexorable fate, but Rosso the Lost finds himself, in memories and dreams of Marja, the woman he must kill. She becomes his Beatrice, his salvation, in this most romantic of tales going nowhere fast, a shaggy-dog story on wheels.