In a dented hearse where the silver plaque “Volvo” can barely be read, Risto works more or less as an impresario and gambles the little money that is credited to his account. Married to a woman who doesn’t want him and an absent father, he lives his days hiding the consequences of his illness, unable and unwilling to stop. The neighbor, Arto, is an affable educator, living together and looking to get pregnant. Everything appears to be normal, except that the former’s huge debts and Arto’s discovery, after a fall, that he has no brains (or rather, that he has only a very small part of them) will change their lives, transforming them from neighbors to business partners. . Driven by the critical situation of their conditions, when they accept a particular job offer, they will be faced with the ruthlessness of randomness.
Structured as a buddy movie, inheriting the classic plot of friendship bringing saving (or almost) reconsiderations, the protagonists interpret two different solitudes, but both affected by misunderstanding and indifference. Risto, a compulsive gambler, a liar and a greedy person, lacks humanity, heart, he has gambled away everything beautiful in his life and nothing and no one can scratch the armor made of problematic carelessness; Arto, on the other hand, is unconsciously lacking intellect, the so-called gray matter, a deficit that has made him, in the eyes of others, a naive person who can be bullied. Only by combining these imperfections will the two “withouts”, even if they reach a point from which it will be difficult to return, find comfort in their relationship, facing themselves and those around them head on, with the awareness of having found someone to share their defects with.
The director Nikki, starting from suggestions that have nothing to do with each other, i.e. three circumstances that actually happened, releases the consolidated calmly pulp humor, curbing the hardcore one exhibited in the previous one The Marcy Killermaking it more lugubriously lively than the unanimous gem The blind man who didn’t want to see the Titanic. What remains constant is the hyperactive mix of genres, counterparts of each other, and realistic conditioning, treated dialectically with minimalism and sensitivity, in which black humor becomes the glue to address significant themes.
Death is a problem of the living
(Dante Mutashar)
Like his compatriot Kaurismaki, who addresses social problems through subtraction, he also problematizes the deterioration of an adiaphoric society that does not allow any shred of magnanimity. It is precisely from this assumption that the title, a phrase echoed many times as a philosophical motto, is more than ever a sentence: “death is a problem of the living”, yes, because all the ruins of a way of life where the death instinct and the self-destructive desire, conscious or not, remain intact, evidence of the natural propensity to survival remains a fierce game governed by fatality.
The intense focus on Risto is probably due to this, as it is in him that the Freudian death drive, exacerbated by a dependence which is the maximum expression of self-sabotage, manifests itself symbolically by imagining how we are, how we could be and how the mechanisms ghosts of reality persist. Excellent and current customization, and yet, not having explored Arto more deeply is a flaw. On the other hand, no one can represent the spokesperson of a covertly positive message more than Arto: existence is a game and sometimes we have nothing to lose.
