Director: Aki Kaurismäki
Year: 2012 | Portugal/Finland
Runtime: 15 minutes.

Watching an Aki Kaurismäki film is like staring at a very cool-looking brick wall that’s clinically depressed, except this wall eventually hands you a cigarette and pours you some aggressively cheap Portuguese wine.

In Tavern Man, Kaurismäki drags his trademark Finnish gloom to Portugal, which feels illegal somehow. The result is a 15-minute short that’s more “cinema” than most three-hour movies, even though it has about twelve lines of dialogue and six of them are just sighs.

The plot is doing the bare minimum. A man runs a tavern. He cooks. He waits. He stares into the middle distance like he’s buffering. Most directors use taverns for chaos, romance, or bar fights. Kaurismäki uses one to conduct a scientific study on how fast soup loses the will to live. The jokes aren’t jokes. They’re in the body language. A guy leans against a doorway like gravity is bullying him.

Sunny, musical Portugal gets filtered through a director who treats smiling like a risky visual effect that might get cut in post. This is comedy by emotional austerity. No punchlines. No enthusiasm. Just the noble act of setting a table for customers who absolutely will not be showing up, like hospitality for ghosts.

If you like your comedy dry, your drama tired, and your films convinced that joy is optional, this is your drink. It’s short, it’s weirdly beautiful, and it’s the only movie that makes having zero customers look like a personal achievement.