A ★★★½ review of Lights in the Dusk

At one point in this movie, Kati Outinen—the star of some of Kaurismäki's early films back in the late eighties, including the incredible and incredibly depressing Match Factory Girl—shows up for a brief cameo playing a glowering cashier at a miserable Helsinki supermarket. This is such a feel-bad movie that seeing her felt like a ray of goddamn sunshine. A recurring theme for Kaurismäki is characters trying to scrape away the subtext of their relationships; approaching what they want with complete bluntness, as if they don't have time for flirting or skirting the issue. Here, this dynamic is a weapon. It's a noir without the ambiguity; you see exactly what Maria Järvenhelmi's reluctant femme fatale is doing, the entire way. And on the other side of that, the sad-sack protagonist (Janne Hyytiäinen) sees it too. No one in this movie has any illusions about it; it's like they've seen the movie before, and they're living through a recurrence that reduces the events of their lives to mere…