"What's prison like?" somebody asks the taciturn ex-con hero of Lights in the Dusk, by way of making small talk. "You can't get out," he replies, stonefaced. "All the doors are locked." It's a good joke, but also an increasingly accurate description of the hermetic, deterministic universe created by the dour-yet-droll Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki. Here, the director frames his familiar tropes — affectless performances, bleeding pools of color, abrupt infusions of rockabilly — within the conventions of film noir, following a luckless security guard, Koistinen (Janne
Hyytiäinen) as he's passively manipulated by Mirja (Maria Järvenhelmi), a Hitchcock-blonde femme fatale. Mirja's dishonorable intentions are almost painfully obvious, but Koistinen is too numbed by loneliness to notice; what follows isn't so much an inexorable chain of events as it is a slow ride on a moving walkway leading directly to further sorrow. The guy could step off, but that would require hopping the railing. Much easier just to stand there.
Lights in the Dusk is the third chapter in what Kaurismäki, no doubt seeking to lend the illusion of shape and substance to his repetitive tendencies, is now calling his Loser Trilogy, following Drifting Clouds (1996) and The Man Without a Past (2002). I mustered a fair bit of affection for both of those, but the new film, though leavened with Kaurismäki's usual deadpan humor, takes a dispiriting turn into miserabilism — Koistinen is used and abused so relentlessly that he might as well be in a Fassbinder flick. At a mere seventy-eight minutes, Lights doesn't wear out its welcome, but those waiting patiently for some culminating act of self-determination will do so in vain. The message: life sucks, and then you forbear. If you don't believe that — or if, like me, you wouldn't want to have such a sentiment reinforced by your entertainment choices even if you did — you may leave the theater feeling recalcitrant. — Mike D'Angelo
