Esko Nikkari

*************************************SPOILERS*********************** As a non Finnish speaker I watched this with Finnish Subtitles to Finnish dialogue. This therefore is my limited understanding of the movie. A Man is attacked by three younger men. The attack is vicious and the first man is robbed and left for dead. He somehow staggers to the hospital where he is thought lost and left by the medical staff only to jump up and leave the place. He is robbed of his boots whilst prone by water but luck has him taken in by people that care for him rather than misuse him. He as he slowly recovers has lost his memory and therefore spends the rest of the film unable to do more than survive via the relative kindness of others. Two youngsters and their mother. A Male friend of hers too. Blind Lemon Jefferson on the sound track and other songs provide clues to the Mystery Man's love of music. The attacked man finds accommodation (at a price) essentially a container. Salvation Army personnel help him and others. And one female Salvation Army officer particular become part of his life. He starts to help the Army in their work. He adds modern or fairly modern songs to the Salvation Army's musical quartet's reportoir and a female Salvation Army leader becomes their singer. He stumbles on the fact that he may have been a welder of some skill. He has already proved he can organise and is gifted a dog. Hannibal. On a visit to the bank - it is robbed and he and a female teller are locked in a vault. The police now take an interest in this mystery man and his identity is sought via the Press. The lawyer that springs him is quite a funny turn. I have never heard a Finnish accent like that gentleman's. Almost undecipherable to me at least. The bank robber later finds him and yields up his ill gotten gains before I assume killing himself Our mystery man spread tht money around his acquaintances and later in the film we find out what part of it was for. His identity is found and he travels to meet the wife he had forgotten who was divorcing him at the time he went missing and that was now complete. It allowed both of them to continue leading their new lives. Another man for the ex-wife and Salvation Army lady for our former Mystery Man. On the way back to Helsinki the three attackers from the start of the film are encountered again but this time he is not alone. The bad men's fates are left to our imagination but I suspect the police were not troubled till later. The man and his new love exit across a railway track.

A farmer's wife is seduced into running away from her stolid older husband by a city slicker, who enslaves her in a brothel.

A woman's terribly dull life is upended by a one-night stand pregnancy, causing her to seek retribution. Iris has a dead-end job in a match-factory, lives with her dour and forbidding parents, and her social life is a disaster. But when she is made pregnant after a one-night stand by a man who thought she was a prostitute, she decides that enough is enough and plans her revenge... —Michael Brooke <michael@everyman.demon.co.uk> Iris leads a bleak existence. She has a dead end job working on the assembly line at a match factory. What meager wages she earns all goes toward supporting her mother and stepfather, with who she lives in a small, crowded house. They largely ignore her unless she does something against their sensibilities, which leads to them exacting emotional and physical abuse toward her. And Iris is also ignored socially, because of her overall somber demeanor and the fact that she has no money to make herself look more attractive to men. She believes her life will change with her chance meeting with well-off businessman, Aarne. However, what she believes is the start of a possible relationship with Aarne was solely a one-night stand for him, he who has no intention of ever seeing her again. The aftermath of this encounter with Aarne leads to Iris making some decisions of how she will deal with her bleak life. —Huggo

Playboy Hamlet sees the ghost of his father, a paper baron in today's Finland. A bizarre black-and-white film noir reworking of Shakespeare's 'Hamlet'. After the death of his father, young Hamlet inherits a seat on the board of a company controlled by his uncle that decides to move into the rubber duck market. But Hamlet is suspicious of the circumstances surrounding his father's death... —Michael Brooke <michael@everyman.demon.co.uk>

An episode in the life of Nikander, a garbage man, involving the death of a coworker, a love affair and much more. Only connect. In gray, class-conscious Helsinki, Nikander is a stoic, solitary garbage man. Cigarettes, coffee, bingo games, and English lessons border his circumscribed life. There are few words, no smiles, and no laughter. Violence and the threat of violence seem close at hand. Ilona, a supermarket clerk who frequently loses her job, bandages Nikander's hand one evening; later he gets her out of a jam, and they begin an on-again off-again relationship. "Why do I keep losing?," Nikander asks his co-worker, Melartin, a man Nikander met in jail and helped get a job. Can he break his losing streak? —<jhailey@hotmail.com>

A slaughterhouse worker and former law student, takes vengeance on the man who killed his fiancée in a hit and run accident. An adaptation of Dostoyevsky's novel, set in modern Helsinki. Slaughterhouse worker Rahikainen murders a man, and is forced to live with the consequences of his actions. —Michael Brooke <michael@everyman.demon.co.uk>