Aki Kaurismäki's 1988 Finnish road movie-cum-crime thriller Ariel is the second in his "proletariat trilogy" of films focused on poor working (and non-working) stiffs struggling to make a living and suffering for it. Aki and his younger brother Mika had begun making films together following the completion of their respective cinema studies, beginning with The Liar (1981). A frequent cowriter and actor for his brother, Aki Kaurismäki broke out as a filmmaker in his own right with Crime and Punishment (1983), an arch adaptation of the Fyodor Dostoyevsky classic, and the first leg of his proletariat trilogy. Ariel might as easily have been called Crime and Punishment II, detailing as it does the serial humiliations of a coal miner (Turo Pajala) who is framed for a crime he did not commit and escapes prison only to find himself hopelessly enmeshed in the Finnish underworld. Influenced by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Melville - and by the American film noir movies that inspired those French filmmakers - Kaurismäki's trademark deadpan style of black comedy had its own effect on American independent cinema, with Jim Jarmush going so far as to cast several of Kaurismäki's actors (among them Ariel's Matti Pellonpää) in his portmanteau film Night on Earth (1991), whose concluding vignette is set in Helsinki. Kaurismäki followed Ariel with The Match Factory Girl (1990).

By Richard Harland Smith