Refugee Khaled's plight as he lands by boat and seeks asylum in Helsinki - his family killed in Syria; his sister missing, last seen at a European border crossing - could be ripped from today's headlines, but director Aki Kaurismäki gives his comedy-drama the look and feel of an early 80s TV drama populated with dour, expressionless people - government agents, police officers, businessmen, minimum wage earners, even a three-man Finland Liberation Army - all dropping their lines like "bricks falling in the wet concrete"(1) and this deadpan stylisation reflects the director's own droll amusement at Finland's (or Australia's, or the world's) resolutely behind-the-times refugee policies; when Khaled, beaten and living in a cupboard, announces to a fellow asylum seeker he has fallen in love with Finland, a country that rejects him but has citizens willing to dabble absurdly and hilariously with multiculturalism if it might, say, rejuvenate a restaurant business, your own reaction will be a Kaurismäki-like dry, expressionless, dismayed "Ha!"
★★★★☆
(1) Filmexplorer Switzerland, 'Interview with Sakari Kuosmanen and Sherwan Haji'
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