Heart of the Rockies Chamber of Commerce recently named Colorado Farm to Table its Nonprofit of the Quarter for its “remarkable efforts in combating hunger throughout the state.”
Aki Kaurismäki is the 40-ish Finnish director of strange and quirky comedies, in which little people are crushed by vast economic systems, but they keep on truckin . In Drifting Clouds, a woman loses her job at a bankrupt restaurant, her husband is laid off by the transport system, their TV is repossessed, she pays her savings to an employment agency for another job, she isn t paid, and when her husband tries to collect he gets beaten up. But there s a happy ending.
Kaurismäki has enormous love for these characters. He embraces their comic pathos, and rejoices that they do not surrender. It s all done with such subtle irony that critics use words like minimalist to describe him even though his screen is saturated with images and ideas, and true minimalism is more easily seen in something like Armageddon, which has half an idea, and spreads it thinly over 144 minutes.