The man is napping on a bench when the thugs attack, and when they are finished with him, he is capable of little but being dragged to hospital. On the operating table he is wrapped head to toe in bandages before being pronounced dead. He rises, puts on some pants, and drifts to an unfamiliar city. You'd think that if he could get through all that, he could manage to retain his memory, too. But give the guy a break.

Aki Kaurismaki's The Man Without a Past stars Markku Peltola as the man, who modestly slumps around Helsinki dockland without a memory in his head or much anxiousness to get his recollections back. A man and his wife give Peltola a meal, and help him find a shack in which to live. They go about their business, more or less expressionlessly. Peltola does the same.

The movie is a strange, quiet little comedy -- one of stillness and distance, as the camera abstractly holds on random messes of objects, and the soundtrack captures the drabness of the wind. Within this atmosphere emerge odd characters, like the landlord who names his peaceful dog Hannibal and assures that the quiet creature is capable of eating a man. Or the policeman who takes an instant disliking to our hero, and engages in a battle of wills with his lawyer, as the two of them sit and play a chess match of precedents and legal clauses.

It's pretty amusing, and would be even more amusing if the trailer had not given away all the best jokes. The problem is, the humour of the material does not combine as well as it should with the filmmaking style. Jim Jarmusch's Stranger than Paradise is famous for getting big laughs out of similarly long, quiet takes, but in that movie the whole point was the comic value of boredom and nothingness. Here, the context is all wrong. The method is absurdist, and so are the characters, and there's nothing straight to play off.

A few days before seeing The Man Without a Past, I wrote a review of Divine Intervention, and complained that it in large part felt like "an endurance test for deadpan comedy." Here again I find myself nonplussed, but although Kaurismaki's film doesn't quite take off, it doesn't become tiresome either. It rolls out slowly as its central mystery gets close to being solved. In intriguingly grim setting, striking colour and random yet enjoyable bits of 1950s American pop. And, unlike in Divine Intervention, these actors aren't straining for blankness in their faces. Somehow every dull expression, and equally every quirk, feels natural.

(Released by Sony Classics and rated "PG-13" for some violence.) 

Review also posted at www.ukcritic.com.