There is such a thing as an aesthetic of concision and minimalism which can lead to very fine pictures as pure and simple as if they eliminated everything but the most essential aspects of a film, just as it can lead to films that have been so fine-tuned and over-nuanced as to leave little left to enjoy. Aki Kaurismäki’s Lights in the Dusk wavers between these two poles for the longest time, as its slim 78-minute running time holds out in hope that the paucity of meat to the script will pay off in the end by the director’s impressive formal control. Through its minimalism of narrative embellishment Kaurismäki’s story points away from itself and directs the attention to the way its story is envisioned. In other words, the scenario is so schematic as to be dismissed almost immediately. Ripped from a thousand nameless noirs, Lights in the Dusk tells of a lone security guard named Koistinen (Janne Hyytiäinen) who unknowingly becomes the patsy to a mob heist when his solitary existence is intruded upon by a blonde femme fatale (Maria Järvenhelmi) who knocks the poor man out (both romantically and literally) to get his keys for her gangster boyfriend/boss/pimp (Ilkka Koivula). Pining over Koistinen from the background is the woman who works the local late night hot dog grill (Maria Heiskanen) and whose attention goes unnoticed even when the guard is accused of the crime and he resolutely will not give up the blonde who obviously betrayed him. Oh, the film is schematic alright, and its characters are nothing but types. But this, of course, is the point. Kaurismäki’s film is not so much a retro-noir (especially since it stringently avoids psychology) as it is a film that tries, in its own way, to play out how noirs work. Cutting briskly to the underlying and simplified social hierarchy of the world, Lights in the Dusk’s archetypal story pivots entirely on how people treat one another, on the empowering fatalism of condescending judgment and the hopeful but destitute life of an open mind. The guard is not a loser so much as someone who people perceive as a loser; no film has so many characters stare at its protagonist with such unmotivated disdain. The cut-to-the-quick concision of Kaurismäki’s film is emblematized in one of its best and most heartrending moments, when just a flicker of scorn escapes Järvenhelmi’s fascinatingly angled face after her first date with the guard. It is devastating precisely because even though we knew that the woman was playing the guard for her boss this is the first moment we also know that she has as much contempt for him as the rest of the characters. The guard approaches most people with a hopeful “Hi” that is never returned, and his solitude and misery is not from a loser-ish passivity that comes from within (he has ambitions to start his own business and tries to get a loan from his bank) but rather from the weight of a society that inexplicably sees him as scum.

Kaurismäki’s style breaks down the path of Koistinen’s social railroading with straightforward stylistic earmarking: the camera dollies towards sinister characters considering the fate of the patsy, and later dollies out when their plot is over; point of view shots are entirely restricted to either Koistinen seeing people look contemptuously at him or their point of view of the pitifully lonesome guard; a solitary, wonderful tracking shot of a moment when the guard is walked home by his silent admirer; glowing shots of Helskini’s harbor side that are totally indifferent to Koistinen; and of course the combination of Kaurismäki’s anti-realistic retro aesthetic (brash swabs of color, greaser haircuts, rock n’ roll music, 1960s automobiles) with Timo Salminen’s amazing photography, casting dilapidation and loneliness with shadow-rich romantic stylization. As Lights in the Dusk is stocked by types and moved by cliché, it is thus envisioned with pristine exaggeration—everything is emphasized directly and overtly, to the point of including the deliberately cruel way the guard is treated even by the bank at which he has an account (they call him scum and send him out by the side door). The grim weight of inevitability clashes directly with Koistinen’s droll, silent perseverance just waiting for the plot to be over and for things to turn his way—miserablism offset both by the security in everyone knowing the direction this story is going and humor resignedly sympathetic to these very machinations of the plot. The strong emphasis on Kaurismäki’s staging places the plot at such a distance that the story and acting seem banal and overworn while the look is utterly refined. Such mannerism speaks towards a desire to exaggerate for a point, and Kaurismäki’s trademark deadpan humor under the influence of such astringent plotting and comic-book characters points directly at the irony at once wretched and hopeful that while Koistinen seems to exist so that people will have someone lower than themselves to point at, someone to take advantage of, the story is always his, will always begin and end with him, and always be dedicated to him as an emblem of the miserable social inevitability of someone being at the bottom rung, a reliance of the jerks in the world on people better than themselves, and finally as a dedication to the fortitude and optimism born from such an existence.