What is this film please?

Foreign language (European) shown on BBC4 a few years ago - a crisis? accident? suicide? in a subway station finds the protagonist resurrected? reincarnated? in a new life, starting a new job, meeting a new wife, in a gray, surreal, ersatz city. Life is a meaningless parody until he is entranced by a smell or a sound coming from a chink in a wall and digs a tunnel back to the real world? life? For which act he is banished to an arctic waste. Does anyone know what this film is?