At the very end, M chooses the shed and life on the waterfront. When he returns he sees the same three punks who attacked him at the beginning beating another man. They recognize him and say they thought they'd already killed him, so he picks up a plank to defend himself, at which a legion of poor men appear and take care of the thugs. This all may seem like a lot of plot but it has no propulsion. Still, just before the end all the incidents seemed to fit together in a way I didn't see coming. It suddenly occurred to me that, of course, M was already dead, that's why the hospital monitoring equipment indicated he had no heartbeat. The whole movie, then, could be a view of life after death, which may take us as we're sitting in despair on a park bench. (The thugs are a lumpen tripartite psychopomp for a society and economy crumbling from the bottom.) All the pesky details of your life--the failed marriage, the self-defeating habits--are erased and you're left in your most elemental form with the few things you can truly care about, in M's case, rhythm-and-blues, a faithful dog, a plot of ground, an inexperienced woman as grateful for him as he is for her, and the guardian-angel opportunity to repair a simple injustice. The fact that M falls in with the Salvation Army fits with this, as does the tango sung in the last scene by the Salvation Army leader, played by Annikki Tähti, a classic Finnish chanteuse, about a wonderful place called Mon Repos. ("Repos" is French for "rest" and in the phrase "éternel repos" carries the connotation of rest beyond the grave.) (See this French article for Kaurismäki's explanation of what the song means to him.)

So, in my mind, anyway, the strands of the meandering narrative all tied up, and in a way that didn't feel too deliberate--no keystone cemented into place telling you that you had got the point (true even of a movie like The Sixth Sense (1999), which I loved). If I'm even close to the writer-director's intentions, then this is probably the least saccharine view of the redemptive afterlife in movie history, one appropriate to Kaurismäki's leftish social outlook and sympathies, a heaven the proletariat would recognize as home.

But even if Kaurismäki intended this neat reading, it doesn't really represent the experience of sitting through the movie, which despite its deliberate deadpan feels uncertain as it pokes along. On one level the Salvation Army setting and the "adorable" tough guy with the sweet doggie may remind you of popular movies made from Damon Runyan material, like Little Miss Marker (1934) starring Shirley Temple, or Guys and Dolls (1955). The purposeful stoniness elicits a different, more rarefied, kind of comic response from its educated audience, but it's still pretty precious.