Warm winter laughs

Aki Kaurismˆki looks and sounds a doleful Finn, usually bibulous in interviews, yet he runs a rock band, a Helsinki pub, and directs films that Charlie Chaplin would envy for their disrespectful comic humanity.

Such is The Man Without a Past: his most accessible work to date, warm-to-blood heat, a comedy about the poor which walks the breadline between surreal events and everyday reality.

It opens brutally with "M" (Markku Peltola), a burly itinerant worker, being mugged, apparently dying, then sitting comically bolt upright in bed, straightening his broken nose beneath the bandages and walking out of hospital to settle in with the bums, winos and work-shy of the Helsinki waterfront. Never was care in the community better self-served or more amusingly depicted.

From possessing nothing, M acquires friends and neighbours, a potato patch, a tin shanty rented from an avaricious security guard on the take (as well as the man's attack dog, a marvellously intuitive and tenderhearted mutt called Hannibal), and the love of a prim Salvation Army matron (Kati Outinen) with a secret yen for light music.

With the help of a beat-up old jukebox, he coaxes her stiff-uniformed colleagues to unbend, stop praising Jesus and start swinging rhythm and blues. Soon he's a poor man's impresario.

It's a pity that M - and we - ever have to find out who he really is. The great Jean Renoir is probably nearer in flavour to this film than Frank Capra. The animating notion of it is the self-sufficient commune of the lowly and the dispossessed that Renoir, in his prewar Front Populaire period of film-making, made sweet socialist propaganda out of.

His Hollywood contemporary simply made screwball comedies that mediated between rich and poor in the American Depression. Hot soup, cold showers in old oil drums, accordion music on the wharf, no taxes, and only a comic ogre to represent always thwarted authority: it's Finnish dreamland, where they may say someone died of cold in winter, but there's always a sunset gleam in the outdoor photography or a Vermeer glow inside the shack.

Kaurismˆki interpolates some sketch-type scenes, too: bureaucrats denying a man social security because he can't supply an identity, a hold-up man robbing the bank that robbed him of his business when it went bankrupt.

These are amusing, but marginalia: simply underlining that it's the poor wot helps the poor, it's the rich wot gets the dosh. The film's real heart - a big one, too - is the unforced romance between the mystery man and the mystic evangelist, both played in a gently stylised manner that puts reality on hold while the fairy tale unfolds.

The film has done well in Europe, but Kaurismˆki, characteristically, has bypassed the big distributors in Britain to allow the ICA to present it. It should have won the Palme d'Or at Cannes last year, but a last-minute reversal of judgment by the jury cost it that prize. At least the photogenic canine in it won a lesser prize known as the Palme d'og. I imagine Kaurismˆki laughed in his cups.

The Man Without A Past
Cert: 12A