The Worthless

Manne, Harri and Ville Alfa are three men in their twenties who belong nowhere. Manne steals a valuable painting from a group of small-time criminals and the business gets bigger. Manne and Harri start running across Finland while Ville goes to Paris. On the road they come across Veera, an old girlfriend of Harri's. The men following them are closing in. Mika Kaurismäki's film is counted among the productions that opened the new vein in Finnish cinema in the eighties. Matti Pellonpää takes the lead; in the years that followed he became the constant face of the Kaurismäki brothers' films. The telling uses the crime picture as a pretext; the real subject is rootlessness and the wish to get out of the country. The tone is cold, the humour dry, the landscape empty.