The Worthless is equally The Rootless-with a bit of Breathless thrown in. Matti Pellonpää, the put-upon Everyman from Shadows in Paradise, here plays a Helsinki dishwasher, Manne, whose life takes a sudden turn for the interesting when a stolen painting falls into the hands of one of his friends (a nervous Jean-Pierre Léaud-like intellectual, played by Aki). The painting is the quarry of an unfriendly underworld trio, and Manne finds himself on the run from cops and crooks alike, traversing Finland in a beat-up car with a gun in the glove compartment, his girl by his side...you get the picture. In a clever post-Godardian pastiche of film clichés-"It's too familiar," a girl who has lost her apartment moans, "young girl, cold, dark street, swaying streetlamp..."-Mika Kaurismäki establishes the territory he would explore further in later films: the gangster road-movie, the sardonic tour of his homeland as a home for the homeless. In The Worthless, everyone wants out, everyone travels light, everyone's a philosopher, and no one wants to grow old. Love is what happens between roadblocks. Mika Kaurismäki describes his first feature with characteristic wry humor: "Compared with other Nordic films, The Worthless has been said to be 'as solitary as a tree in a wasteland.' Nobody knows what that means. Maybe nothing? Be that as it may, The Worthless has succeeded in breaking out of a realism possessed by naturalism and its counterpoint, the national-romantic mythology. To do this the film has had to create its own laws, morals and iconic reality. The film's main characters are just as alone in forging their destiny as we are in forging our own. This is no coincidence."