Shadows in Paradise, set in Helsinki, tells the love story of a garbage truck driver and a supermarket cashiergirl which unfolds between spring and autumn 1986. Aiming erracticaly at poetic realism, the film provides us with a few kisses, the sea crashing into the shore, the terrifying mouth of a garbage crucher and the whole tragi-comic melancholy of life in a metropolis. It is also one of the best European films released in 1986, in spite of occasional lapses in the dramaturgy at the beginning of the penultimate reel (just before Nikander takes Ilona into his arms) and the unreasonable optimism of the final scene (for which nothing this director has ever experienced can give any justification). Aki Kaurismaki