Reviews: Movie

Lights in the Dusk

Directed by Aki Kaurismaki, staring Janne Hyytiainen (pictured), Maria Heiskanen

If you're a fan of Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki's deadpan comedy world, then his latest piece of controlled, semi-stylised whimsy will be right up your alley.

Janne Hyytiainen plays Koistinen, a lonely security guard in Helsinki with traces of Keaton and Chaplin in his DNA. He is seduced by an enigmatic blonde who secretly works for a gangster, in search of the entry codes to the shopping mall Koistinen patrols, where jewellery can be stolen.

Kaurismaki loves close-ups on drolly impassive faces and absurdist dialogue filmed with direct sightlines into camera. A digestibly light serio-comedy.

Peter Bradshaw with The Guardian

The Caiman

Directed by Nanni Moretti, staring Silvio Orlando, Michele Placido

Nanni Moretti's muddled and messy anti-Berlusconi satire now looks even more exasperating than when I first saw it in Cannes last May: a tricksy film-within-a-film about a hack director who signs up to what he thinks is an action thriller without realizing it's a polemic against the hated media-political potentate.

The Caiman first came out in Italy a couple of weeks before the hair-transplanted rogue was defeated at the polls. It could conceivably have shoved him on his way: But Moretti, a member of Italy's successful media classes, had many years to attack this man while he was super-powerful. Even now he is, in effect, pulling his punches.

PB

(China Daily 04/10/2007 page20)