This man's job is even more burdensome as it may appear. It extends beyond giving up a man's pride and dealing with a pool of unattractive and unconventional clientele. It takes him even more to protect his loved one, to an extent that he accepts a child not of his own, conceals his anger towards a man who sleeps with and impregnates his wife, hides his worries of losing his job and changing his "career" from his wife to protect her from aggravated depression. This is the courage and conviction of a person who sacrifices himself to protect and please his loved one. A hilarious and entertaining film which is romantic at its heart, with a bleak ending showing the harsh reality that well-meaning sacrifice is not always reciprocated and the poor often gets poorer. Although the ending shoot in the ambulance is sweet, what happens to the family afterwards is probably less so.

I recently saw this at the 2008 Palm Springs International Film Festival. Director/Writer Aleksi Salmenperä, Producer Tero Kaukomaa and Actor Jani Volanen were on hand for a Q&A following the film. This film was Finland's official entry for Best Foreign Language Film for the Academy Award and is the second feature for Salmenperä. This is a small film but very good and features a great cast with plenty of interesting characters. Juha (Tommi Korpela) is a big, strong stone worker at a factory who has resorted to stealing company equipment to help make ends meet at home where he has three young children and a depression medicated wife Katja (Maria Heiskanen). After Juha loses his job he decides to try his luck as a handyman doing bulletin board solicited home repairs. With the help of his best friend Oli (Jani Volanen), his new job quickly evolves into that of a male prostitute for mature women with Oli serving as his secretary and chauffeur and another friend creating a website to offer his services on. Katja of course, must not find out about Juha losing his job and his new line of work so another friend covers for him at his old job should his wife call there and Juha leaves the house early every day to give the illusion of his typical job routine and changes into his old work clothes before he comes home. Since much of his work as a male call guy is at night he concocts a story that he is doing a home repair job after work for extra money that will take several months to complete. There are plenty of comic situations here but it is also a gritty drama and Salmenperä did a lot of research into the world of heterosexual male prostitutes to come up with his story which give a believability to the clientèle Juha encounters. Nicely photographed by cinematographer Tuomo Hutri, I would give this an 8.0 out of 10 and recommend it.

On the face of it this is every schoolboy fantasy in the world - to have women eager to pay you for sex. Of course those schoolboys think in terms of their peers rather than older dysfunctional women, indeed to a schoolboy 25 is 'old' so that they would quickly become disabused by the lineup here, which includes a victim of Downs' Syndrome who is also the youngest 'client' on display. If none of the women are actually ugly and some not even plain there is still a moral question which must be addressed. Juhe is both husband and father as well as being jobless and stumbles into his new 'profession' by chance although having done so he takes to it like a duck to water. The film is well made and largely sympathetic and unerotic but the question remains is this a job for a nice Finnish boy and the answer must be no.

At the time of writing IMDb advise that the UK title for this film is, 'A Man's Work' but it was shown as, 'A Man's Job' at its London Film Festival screening yesterday, which I would have thought was a better title. As for the film itself, it is rather difficult to enjoy because of all the unhappiness on display. It is an insightful and compassionate piece of work but hard to get very close to those involved. Finland sits twixt Scandinavia and the old Soviet block and have until the first world war been first part of Sweden and then Russia. We consider Scandinavians to be prone to depression, perhaps because of the cold and darkness and maybe Finns suffer more because of the added element of schizophrenia. Anyway, everybody here seems dysfunctional and when you discover that the film tells of its main character getting involved in offering services to older ladies and even a Down's syndrome sufferer, things don't get much more cheery. Its well done and for the most part, almost convincing but it is badly let down by the ending. I assume that this is intended as a happy ending and perhaps to the Finns it is but to me and my fellow, stunned into silence, cinema goers, it seemed a desperately sad end indeed.