Winning a slew of awards at Cannes, and an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Picture (the only Finnish film to be so honoured to date), The Man Without a Past is not only Aki Kaurismäki’s most critically lauded film but also one of his most popular.

It tells the tale of a workman, played by Markus Peltolta, who loses his memory after a brutal mugging but who finds support and camaraderie among the poor who live in shipping containers at the port of Helsinki. A tentative romance blossoms with Irma, played by Kaurismäki regular Kati Outinen, a Salvation Army volunteer running a soup kitchen.

The story then follows a traditional arc of redemption and self-discovery (literally so as his identify is eventually revealed), including boy meets girl, boy loses girl and boy finds girl again. But what elevates this above the trite is the director’s trademark absurdism and sly humour.

The story nods repeatedly to biblical themes. The hero is pronounced dead in the hospital after the attack but then awakens and departs under his own steam like a latterday Lazarus. He has misfortune upon misfortune thrust upon him, like Job, but the theme that ultimately defines the film, and so much of Kaurismäki’s oeuvre, is that of the Good Samaritan, here represented not just by Irma but by the Nieminen family who nurse him back to health among the battered but cheerful community of the port..

“Kaurismaki’s compassion for the dispossessed is all more the engaging because of his lack of brow-furrowing seriousness; his movie is like a cork bobbing amiably on waves of lightness and unforced gaiety – always on the edge of surreality but never quite going further.” Peter Bradshaw – The Guardian

“At the end of “The Man Without a Past,” I felt a deep but indefinable contentment. I’d seen a comedy that found its humor in the paradoxes of existence, in the way that things may work out strangely, but they do work out.” Roger Ebert – rogerebert.com