Linbeymusol Wonderful character development!

GazerRise Fantastic!

Tacticalin An absolute waste of money

Sexyloutak Absolutely the worst movie.

Sergeant_Tibbs My first taste of Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki, I watched Shadows In Paradise shortly after finding out about it because it's so short and seemed to be sweet. Based on reputation and plot lines, Kaurismäki looked to be the Finnish Mike Leigh in his representation of working life, or perhaps anti-Mike Leigh with his minimalist dialogue. The film is good, but too slight to have a big impact. It's a very simple love story, similar to films like Badlands where a couple do wrong to be with each other, but not a lot of exciting events happen. It's well shot and the cinematography is great even if the editing isn't always the best. But it holds back on its characters far too much for me to be invested. Interesting breezy watch though.7/10

bigverybadtom This was part of a set of three movies by the same director, but after seeing this movie I had no desire to see the others.The box describes "Shadows In Paradise" as a romantic comedy. But the romance is lifeless and there are at best only a few mild chuckles. We don't really know-or find much reason to take interest in-any of the characters.The premise could have made a good story. Nikander is a middle-aged man who is now a garbage collector but used to be a butcher (but we don't find out more). Ilona is a woman who keeps losing jobs through no fault of her own, and steals her former employer's cash box out of revenge. They meet and have an on-again, off-again romance, and Nikander also rescues an unemployed man from prison and has him get a job as a fellow garbage collector. This man has a wife and child, though he says their relationship is unhappy.Unfortunately, everyone seems to be just going through the motions. Nikander has the same expression throughout the movie, as do most of the actors; aspects of the characters are mentioned but they remain undeveloped, and overall, there is no tension or excitement, and at a mere 75 minutes the movie seems overlong. The critics who praise it seem to be the sort who think any non-American film must be wonderful.

tedg I am attracted to ambitious films, ones that challenge and that have a lot of powerful layered machinery. It is how I build my life.They are work. Art is work if you intend to collect and use it as fuel. So when you refine your notions about which films are worth the effort, you implicitly also make decisions. There are the films that aren't worth the precious time you have left, of course. But along the way you also find those films and filmmakers you can relax with. Instead of putting your whole soul on the line, you can just find a groove and relax.I only knew this filmmaker from 'The Man with No Past,' and that had a little too much bitter in the bittersweet. This is apparently his first film in that form. It isn't something he invented, but because he is Finnish, it may be the most effective distillation of it.There are two characteristics. One is the very careful flattening into two cinematic worlds. One is very straightforward: things are as they seem. People are no more than what you encounter: their inner selves are worn on their faces. You see all the way to the bottom. The encounters are simple, here we have simple friendship: two guys meet in jail. They are friends before the first one even wakes up to an offered cigarette. (There is more smoking in this film than I think I have ever seen.) There is the simplest reduction of romance, or rather the cinematic romance of the date movie. This always runs the risk of being cartoonish, or cloying, or even just boring, no matter how genuine. The second world is one of cinematic dreams, of what you really dream when you awake and think it was of love. It is highly economical, and deeply symbolic. A best friend of 25 years dies suddenly, someone we have invested in, someone with plans that will have formed the basis of the movie to come, we expect. Ten seconds and he is gone. As soon as we get the minimum information, almost as sparse as a Rockwell painting, we have a shot of a black dog running away under a garbage-strewn elevated road. That also is only a few seconds, but it gives us the shadows, the dream foundation, and is so richly evocative we instantly collaborate by filling in what we know from our dreams, the fears, sadness, disorder of death.In most filmmakers, this second world is shoved in your face and delivers humor, or perhaps some delivered allegory. And that is where the power of detachment comes in. Nordic people are famously flat emotionally, but among them, Finns are extreme. And is seems that among Finns, Kaurismäki is extreme. Both of these layers are presented in an Anti-Hitchcock fashion. The camera has no identity, makes no judgement, has no dreams.Both worlds are delivered with no emotional content and an absolute minimum of structure. All you do is pour in your own, which you can do, but only because there is a shadow layer that affirms dreams. I am tempted to say that the love story is the same, folding the foreground of the garbage collector and the dreams he has as the woman he falls in love with as instantly and effortlessly as every other raindrop in this film.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Graham Greene There's an almost silent film like quality to much of Kaurismäki's work, with that notion of a cinema of images that works without the extraneous use of dialogue or the broader notions of exposition. What this results in is a style of film-making in which the most simple of images tells a story. Simplicity is essentially the key to this film; not simply within the set up, in which a bin man begins a furtive relationship with a supermarket checkout girl, but in the presentation of the film itself. Some critics have used worlds like minimalist or unassuming when discussing the films of Kaurismäki, and in particular, his early trilogy of films, of which Shadows in Paradise (1986) would be the first, but to me, it's more about simplification; stripping away all the usual narrative window-dressing and over complicated presentation of technique to get to the very centre of the story and the heart of these characters.This was Kaurismäki's third film as a director, though at times you could argue that it feels more like his first. His actual debut came with Crime and Punishment (1983), a typically straight-faced adaptation of the classic Dostoevsky novel, with the more obvious Kaurismäki touches at this point still being in the somewhat embryonic stages. This was followed by the oddly surreal and coolly episodic Calamari Union (1985), a bizarre black and white comedy that drew on the influence of Bertrand Blier's Buffet Froid (1979) to tell the story of fifteen men - fourteen of them named Frank Merciless, and an idiot man-child named Pekka - who leave behind the hopeless working class district of Eira and quest to the near-mythical suburb of Kallio. These films are somewhat ambitious, both in terms of their narrative scope and the technical presentation, suggesting the work of a filmmaker already fairly confident about what cinema is and what his cinema should accomplish. In comparison, Shadows in Paradise seems content to tell an honest story about small, everyday characters in such a way as to not draw too much attention to itself.There's nothing wrong with that. There is a pure art to the presentation of subtlety - something that Kaurismäki is well aware of - and although I tend to prefer his more inventive and idiosyncratic films, such as the aforementioned Calamari Union, as well as the far greater films like Hamlet Goes Business (1987), Ariel (1988) and The Man Without a Past (2003), there is something quite commendable about a film that attempts to work on such a honest and simple level. The relationship between the characters here is something most of us can identify with, as the odd relationship between Nikander and Ilona propels the story, which is further grounded by Nikander's friendships with his co-workers, Esko and Melartin. As even with Kaurismäki the film works as a result of the perfect casting, with Matti Pellonpää, Kati Outinen, Sakari Kuosmanen and Esko Nikkari, all regulars of the director's work, managing to give so much information about the lives of these characters with gestures so small and exchanges so subtle as to be completely lost on a less attentive audience.For me, Shadows in Paradise isn't the greatest of Kaurismäki's films, or indeed, the best place to start. However, it does show hints of the style that would be further developed, not least in the two films that would continue and close this loose, thematic trilogy, Ariel and The Match Factory Girl (1990), but in far more ambitious and imaginative projects like Leningrad Cowboys Go America (1989), Drifting Clouds (1994) and Lights in the Dusk (2006). That said, Shadows in Paradise does offer the usual high quality of performance and direction, with the typical Kaurismäki approach to low-key production design and warm cinematography. If you're already familiar with the director's later films then Shadows in Paradise is certainly worth seeking out, if only for the chance to see the formation of that unique style and the soon to be recognisable approach to character and narrative.