Skimming through the movies on television as I often do when I go home to my parents’ house, I recently found a Finnish film called “Lights in the Dusk” (2006) on Sundance. The description promised loneliness, neo-noir, and Finnish people; I was in. What transpired over the next 80 minutes was about as sparse a movie as I’ve seen. It was also positively art.

The first artist I can compare this director to, with my limited experience, is Samuel Beckett. Both artists have taken it upon themselves to show their audience the safety net still available to people in modern society. The first piece of Beckett I think of in this regard is “Endgame.” While it seems as though the protagonists in “Endgame,” as well as Koistinen in “Lights,” have nothing at all going for them despite all their honest efforts, in the end the presence of a single friend, a soul with which one might commiserate in an otherwise indifferent world, redeems a life which otherwise might very well result in the abyss being argued against in Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus. Humans must periodically find a reason to go on.

Here I’ve gotten ahead of myself; I suppose I might expect a reader to be vaguely familiar with Endgame, but asking you to be familiar with this relatively obscure Finnish movie is a bit much, isn’t it? The movie features Koistinen, a lonely security guard who is trying earnestly but cannot seem to catch a break. His co-workers either ignore him or mock him. He attends a trade school in an effort to learn enough business to follow his dream of opening a garage. When he goes to the bar to try to meet people, nobody wants anything to do with him. His is a lonely existence. Eventually, a gorgeous blond woman sits down to “keep him company” in an empty coffee shop. They date, awkwardly, and eventually she uses him to frame him for a robbery of the jewelery store for which he is a security guard. He goes to jail because he won’t give her up, through anything, and gets out after a year. While working as a dishwasher, the woman’s boss gets him fired (he does have a conviction for theft). He tries to kill the guy, pathetically, with a knife, fails, gets beaten up, and finds himself at the end of the movie in a sandpit, beaten nearly to death.

So what’s good about the movie? A few things. One, the director makes the audience love his protagonist. It upsets us (or it did me, in any case) that this guy keeps getting marginalized even though he’s putting in an honest effort. Two, the blond seductress fills the screen with so much self-loathing in every scene she’s in that you just know things will end badly for her. She’s a wonderful example of what happens to those who compromise their morals for the greater machine. Three, early in the movie a dog sits outside a bar. Koistinen tries to stand up for it because it’s been neglected outside that bar for days. He fails. That dog pretty obviously represents Koistinen, as well as the best of citizens in this society: Loyal to a fault, even when they’re horribly mistreated. Finally, there’s the hot dog stand. A somewhat attractive woman at the hot dog stand finds herself attracted to Koistinen, somehow, even after Koistinen pathetically brags about his “girlfriend” to her. She takes care of him after he has been rejected and gotten himself drunk. She writes him a letter (which he tears up) while he’s in prison. At the end of the movie, she comes to him in the sandpit, and, in the film’s final shot, their hands embrace. Two lonely souls finally find each other after so much negativity throughout the rest of the movie. I loved it.

Takeaway for me? For starters, I have a college degree which will hopefully help me to avoid a situation where so many people so blatantly disrespect me. That degree, and the knowledge that came with it, is truly a blessing that I will try to leverage for a long time in my attempts to navigate society. Beyond that, following Koistinen’s example of putting in an honest effort just to stay alive seems to me to be an inspiration. Sometimes, you feel sorry for yourself because things aren’t exactly as you’d like them. You have to keep going. Finally, obviously, the human touch will redeem you through a whole lot. This is a theme I’ve touched on with a great many poems I’ve written. My favorite example of this comes from Milton, when Adam speaks with Raphael about how angels love in Paradise Lost (I’ll find the quote when I have a text in front of me with my notes). I believe that humans want, sometimes more than anything, to melt into someone else and share with them. We want that at our very core. This film highlights that, and for me, that makes it beautiful.