When I first saw Ariel, at the beginning of the Nineties, maybe three years after it was first released, it blew me away. At the time I had gone through a long streak of awful "alternative" movies, the last one having been Atom Egoyan's "The Adjuster"; I was totally depressed and fed up with cinema in general since all the movies around seemed to be either generic Hollywood block busters or equally generic "intellectual" time wasters -- "The Adjuster" being a perfect example of the latter category. When I left the cinema after having seen Ariel, I had tears of joy in my eyes, thinking: "thank god, I do not have to give up going to the cinema after all". Ariel is exactly the movie I wish I had made, very cool, funny, stylish, engaging, romantic, hard core, subtle. I have seen it many times since, it has become my all - time favourite, desert - island movie. Of course there are other good movies around, but few which match its quality, and none of them changed my outlook on cinema the way Ariel did. Other Kaurismäkis movies I have seen and loved are "MacBeth", "I Hired A Contract Killer", "La vie de bohème", "Tulitikkutehtaan tyttö" ("The Match Factory Girl"), "Juha"; the Leningrad Cowboy flicks were OK, but not really my cup of tea.
Anyway, I have a small anecdote I want to get off my chest: shortly after seeing A I was talking with a couple of co - workers about movies, and one of them said: "the other day I saw the best movie ever, it's called Ariel, it blew me away, I haven't washed my eyes since", etc. I thought, wow, I would have never thought that she would like that movie, but there you go, truly good movies just have a universal appeal. Only years later did I find out that she had been talking about not Kaurismäkis' masterpiece but Disney's "Arielle -- The Little Mermaid". ;-)
