Finland consistently ends up tops on the world's happiness/education/low-crime-rate polls, beating fellow Nordic countries like Sweden: It's just that nobody told Aki Kaurismaki when he was making "The Proletariat Trilogy". His Finland is a drab dead man's town, full of resigned First-World poverty, his bumming characters hiding their disillusion behind clouds of cigarrete smoke and/or garish mustaches.
More so than "The Matchstick Factory Girl" or "Shadows in Paradise", "Ariel" is a Coen Brothers movie, if the Coen brothers were laconic and had a Finnish sense of humor. Taisto (Turo Pajala, who looks like Colin Farrell would look like after years of being a wage slave), is stoically shocked by someone else's sudden suicide, bummed out by unemployment, finds a new sorta-family with a meter maid and her gun-toting kid, goes through a stint in prison, befriends Mikkenon (Matti Pellonpaa, Kaurismaki's frequent, frowsy muse), gets out of the pen, indulges in robbery... As a solution to too many problems, Taisto's meter-maid lover arranges to stow the wole crazy crew aboard a ship called the "Ariel." "Ariel", (like Ariella from Susan Hubbard's book, or Disney's salt-water-girl) is of course a reference to the airy spirit of Shakespeare's "The Tempest", an unpredictable creature that aches to fly towards freedom and is nonetheless a prisoner. How SYMBOLIC! Everytime a movie's named after a sea-worthy vessel, symbolism sets sail. Then again the only other one that comes to mind is Woody Allen's "Cassandra's Dream", named after a boat, and starring COLIN FARRELL!!! See how it all comes together in "Hallucina"?
Anyone, it all ends with Taisto getting the hell out of Finland to find a better life in a better place. Like MEXICO! I guess the ice IS always whiter on the other side.