A soppy, sentimental film about migration and being a foreigner by Finnish director Mika Kaurismäki, who has done much better than this. Chinese guy turns up in a small Lapland town looking for a Finnish hockey player who bailed him out of a debt to "bad guys", and ends up staying to become the cook in the gruesome local diner where the cute but troubled owner reguarly provides horrible food to a community of humourous curmudgeons. He wins her heart and theirs, and ends up marrying her and staying, and becoming reconciled to Finnish culture as they all become enthusiasts for Chinese cooking.
It's a sweet, beautiful but not very interesting film, and it soft-soaps the problems of migration and exile into a fairy tale. It's also oddly like the film Le Havre, by Kaurismäki's younger brother Ari, which also features a refugee taken in and cherished by the local community.
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