86 minutes
Finnish
“Perhaps Kaurismäki’s most original film and probably his best” (William Fisher), this brilliant refashioning of Shakespeare’s tragedy, set in the cutthroat world of high finance, makes surprising analogies between the rotten state of Denmark then and the corrupt state of Finland in the money-hungry ’80s. This Hamlet’s ineffectual prince (Pirkka-Pekka Petelius) is a chubby, google-eyed electronics buff with a “heart as warm as a refrigerator,” who schemes and conspires to sell his father’s shipbuilding business so that he can corner the market on rubber ducks; Polonius is a property manager, Laertes a marketing man, and Ophelia (Kati Outinen, natch) an infatuated, suicidal wannabe. “Confidently post-Fassbinder in its noir-ish angles and deadpan cool” (J. Hoberman, The Village Voice), Hamlet Goes Business is gorgeously shot in stylish black and white, but as Kaurismäki himself warns, “Don’t be fooled by the plastic beauty of this movie: the question is about money — a matter of life and death.”
filmingo offers a curated selection of arthouse films for streaming by subscription or individual rental. Run by the Swiss foundation trigon-film.