Finnish film well done, but too small

In a week that has seen two absolute giants of international film die, you can measure the importance of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni by seeing how much their art influenced other filmmakers.

One such example is the work of the Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki, a droll talent whose 2002 film “The Man Without a Past” was a delightful reminder of how good he is when he’s on his game. Like Bergman, Kaurismaki has a skeptical Nordic viewpoint about the world, and like Antonioni he has a sense that the empty spaces of the modern city are the mirror of an emptiness in modern lives.

Kaurismaki’s new one, “Lights in the Dusk,” is a minimalist offering – expertly made but without the rich feeling of “Man Without a Past.” Maybe it suffers from being too similar in story.

Our hero is a sad-sack night watchman, Koistinen (played by the slight, mournful Janne Hyytiainen), who is ill-treated by the world. Friendless to begin with, he finds himself at the receiving end of a gangster’s scam, seduced by a femme fatale who simply wants to know the security codes he has at his fingertips.

Kaurismaki rolls out Koistinen’s Job-like suffering as a series of blackout sketches, as though humiliation and disappointment were the director’s accepted modes of living. As usual, the depiction of Helsinki is evocative and melancholy.

Kaurismaki has long been a fan of silent movies (he actually made a movie without dialogue once), and “Lights” plays for long stretches with almost no words spoken.

In “Man Without a Past,” these kinds of mannerisms worked better; at least the hero there had suffered a head injury and couldn’t remember anything. Koistinen is just hapless – and the audience can see that there’s someone for him, if only he’d open his eyes and see.

It’s still a pleasant movie that couldn’t possibly be any longer than its swift 78-minute running time. The modesty of the film is like its hero, but I’d love to see Kaurismaki aim for something bigger next time out.