The Finnish filmmaker, Aki Kaurismaki, working in France and in French, and reviving (or at least propping up the embalmed cadaver of) the mythical struggling artist in Paris. Three of them, to be precise: an Albanian portrait painter with a dog by the name of Baudelaire, an evicted playwright (unproduced magnum opus: The Avenger, a Play in Twenty-One Acts), a modernist composer (work in progress: The Influence of Blue on the Arts) — all the basic bases covered. They say things amongst themselves like "Your principles prevent you eating bread bathed in the sweat of the people" and "The voice of the people is the voice of God." They never smile. They persist. They get ahead by millimeters. They fall back again. No doubt the director's brand of dour and stolid absurdism is an acquired taste. Sample savory morsel: the deported, and then illegally re-entered, Albanian's reunion with his yelping dog while his two comrades wait discreetly outside the door, smoking cigarettes and avoiding one another's eyes. Everything else aside, the black-and-white photography, with its almost excruciating sensitivity to texture, to light and shade, to gradations of gray, ought to be adequate inducement for any true movie buff to hold his nose and gulp it down gladly. With Matti Pellonpaa, Andre Wilms, Kari Vaananen, and cameos by Sam Fuller and Louis Malle. (1993) — Duncan Shepherd
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