No one ever accused Finnish wunderkind Aki Kaurismaki of being Mr Chuckle-Trousers, but this latest picture initially looks to give even old King Grump Ingmar Bergman a run for his misery. Must be something they put in the water up there.

It’s Helsinki. Ilona Koponen (Kati Outimen) is head waiter at the Dubrovnik, where she is friendly with dangerously alcoholic chef Lajunen. The company her tram diving husband Lauri (Kari Vaananen) works for are making cutbacks and he’s first out on his ear. Then, as restaurants ail across the city, the axe finally falls on the Dubrovnik. Now both Ilona and Lauri are without work, and even their short lived joy at his landing a post driving a tour bus is scuppered when he fails the medical because he’s deaf in one ear. This is a surprising amount of plot for a Kaurismaki.

Drifting Clouds is an almost optimistic comedy about unemployment. Laconic, bleak, deadpan certainly, but in its own laconic, bleak, deadpan fashion it’s also very very funny. Although its writer-director claims to have ‘lost all hope in the world’, he still clings to a belief that ‘people should leave the cinema slightly happier than when they went in... I want to pretend.’

Our downtrodden heroes pretend by acquiring a shiny new Sony on HP and a set of bookshelves. When we’ve paid for those, one says, we can buy some books to put on them. They approach employment, redundancy and the repossession of their new toys with the same straight-faced stoicism throughout. Imagine a funny Ken Loach without the patronising middle-class politics. Silence is important because people need the time to think before they act, with the endearing Outimen and Vaananen the very essence of dour.

This is one of Kaurismaki’s most interior films, rarely venturing outside, and even then finding itself ambushed under oppressive Nordic skies. Minimalist by nature, so minimalist by design, the state board accuse him of having ‘taken Finnish tourism back 10 years.’. If his films are to be believed (and this is one of the very best), here is a country that never quite got over 1974. Drifting Clouds reads, paradoxically, like surrealist neo-realism; everything looks like a set.

Kaurismaki is a pal of Jim Jarmusch, and it shows. The Stranger Than Paradise director is certainly the closest equivalent the Fin has in English-speaking cinema, with perhaps just a soupcon or two of Hal Hartley on the side. How much you buy his sense of existential gloom depends on how much of kick you get from such seriously anti-Hollywood film-making. (One is reminded of UK director Terence Davis’ scheme for a car chase: one car, moving very slowly.) ‘The camera, like me, is tired,’ Kaurismaki says. ‘And one of us hasn’t got the energy to move the other.’

Highlights come when, announcing his deafness to Ilona, Lauri simply topples over, and later, when she very nearly almost smiles at him. You had to be there. Funniest film of the year.