"I'm Nikander: ex-butcher, now garbage man. Bad teeth. Liver hanging on. No use asking what I want." This is where the hero of Shadows in Paradise begins and ends, and yet... In the tragicomedy of his life, Nikander (played by Kaurismäki regular Matti Pellonpää) emerges as something unlikely on the screen: a human being. Against a background of urban indifference, Nikander merely exists until he meets Ilona, a bounced supermarket checker; then they merely exist together. Their dates in funereal bingo halls are profoundly unsatisfying, their affair virtually sexless, their emotions brief and incoherent. (A typical conversation: "I thought you were a local." "No." "Where from?" "Down the street.") Ilona steals the supermarket cash box and would run off to Florida, but misses her plane; Nikander is invited into business with a fellow garbageman, who dies of a heart attack on the spot. In short, they were made for each other-and they have only each other, in a world in which nothing is as it should be, but everything is the way it is. (And all the while, American style good-time music on the soundtrack says, "This is the way it should be.") So we experience a tension commensurate with the small scale of this funny and moving film: will Nikander lose everything, again? Aki Kaurismäki has worked subtly and skillfully to develop our empathy amid the black comedy, so that for once, Nikander and Ilona might emerge from the shadows as heroes, and not just victims.