Turo Pajala

Taisto Kasurinen is told over a loudspeaker that the mine has shut, and Turo Pajala answers with a nod. He nods again when his father hands him the keys to a white Cadillac in a café and steps out to the lavatory, and again when the roof will not go up and he has to drive the length of Finland with snow on the seats. The nod is the performance. For the first twenty minutes it looks like nothing, and somewhere around the half-hour it starts to arrive more slowly, and you find you can read a whole day's disappointment in the delay. We laughed at the roof, and at the father's exit, and then we looked at Pajala's face taking none of it personally and felt ashamed of ourselves, which we suspect is the order Kaurismäki intended.

He did not have a long run at it. He began in the mid-1980s in supporting parts, among them Paavo in the Finnish noir Pimeys odottaa (1985), and then made two films with Aki Kaurismäki almost back to back: Rosencranz in Hamlet Goes Business (1987), a modern Hamlet set in a Finnish company, and the lead in Ariel (1988). Kaurismäki's method suited him. Timo Salminen shot both films, Matti Pellonpää appears in both, and in Ariel the father who hands over the keys is played by Erkki Pajala, who was his father. Pellonpää's Mikkonen, met once Taisto's luck has properly gone, treats him with a courtesy so weary it is almost tender, and Pajala receives it the way he receives everything, which is to say barely. It is the best pairing in the film.

What Pajala does is a specific thing and it needs a specific kind of film around it. Kaurismäki holds the shot, gives him little to say and nobody to say it to, and lets the audience do the feeling on his behalf. Without that frame, a face that does almost nothing would read as blank. Whether his could carry a film made any other way we cannot say, because nobody built another one around it. After Ariel he took smaller parts in films and television and stepped back from public view; his last feature was Kulkurin taivas (1998), as Ahti, and his final screen appearance was a small television role in 2007. We have not seen the later work and will not pretend to.

So the recommendation is simple. Watch Ariel, which asks for 73 minutes and pays for them, and go in knowing that its leading man will show you nothing and expect you to meet him halfway. From here the career looks rather like one of Kaurismäki's plots: a man is handed something, drives south, and does not come back.