This film, from the beginning of Kaurismäki's career, reminded me, to a certain extent, of another iconic film about the lost illusions of the 60s and 70s generations, The Wretches Are Still Singing, by the Greek Nikos Nikolaidis.
Of course, Nikolaidis's cinematic language is much more caustic and corrosive. Kaurismäki is faithful to his minimalist principles, as a poet of the absurd. But the essential theme is the same: a lost generation, overtaken by events, that searches, in vain, for a meaning in life in the technocracy that emerged from the rubble of the revolution (real or imaginary).
If Nikolaidis is destructive (and he would be even more so in 1983's Sweet Bunch, in which he practically defends urban guerrilla warfare) Kaurismäki is poetic, transforming disillusionment into a chimerical search for the mythical Eira, Holy Grail of aimless knights, survivors of punk nihilism.
An interesting and original work, even for those who already know Kaurismäki's minimal cinematographic language.
