Aki KaurismäkiLE HAVRE

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Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki is a bundle of contradictions. His work is steeped in nostalgia but never irrelevant; it’s indulgently wistful without being saccharine. Le Havre follows much in this vein, as it sees life in the eponymous port town shaken up by the discovery of a crate-load of illegal immigrants on its docks. With purposefully stilted, stagey performances and a masterful understanding of deadpan comedy, Le Havre is an undeniably quirky and surprisingly moving account of what happens when two worlds collide. There’s not a lot of work for shoe-shiner Marcel Marx (André Wilms) these days. He wanders the streets of Le Havre with a beaten-up suitcase, trying

Words and design Avalon Lyndon

to drum up a little business. At home, his dormouse of a wife Arletty (Kati Outinen) struggles to make ends meet, putting her husband’s wellbeing before her own. When she is suddenly hospitalised with a mysterious illness, Marcel doesn’t really know what to do with himself. Meanwhile, a shipping container of illegal African immigrants is intercepted on the docks of Le Havre. As the police take names,

young Idrissa (Blondin Miguel) makes a break for freedom. After a chance meeting at the port, these two lost souls strike up an unlikely friendship and Marcel vows to help Idrissa cross the channel and make his way to London. Kaurismäki’s penchant for nostalgia plays out well in these circumstances. His port town of Le Havre is an idea of ‘old France’, untouched by the passing of time. This is the France

but it only takes a few jokes and a shared meal to find common ground between an old bohemian Frenchman and a wary group of African immigrants. This is by no means an accurate picture of modern France’s political climate. Social realism this is not. Kaurismäki’s underlying sense of theatricality serves as a constant reminder that what we are watching is nothing more than

of street artists and accordions, vin rouge and cobbled streets. But among his townsfolk, Kaurismäki throws in a distinctly ‘modern’ mindset. Rather than defaulting to the bigotry and small-mindedness that sadly persists in parts of France even today, Le Havre’s residents rally behind the young boy. There’s a fantastic moment when Marcel goes to find the boy’s relatives on a cliff-side campsite: initially they’re suspicious,

“Kaurismäki has constructed astaged, stumbling world where

idealism clashes with authority.”

“Kaurismäki has constructed astaged, stumbling world where

idealism clashes with authority.”

a construction. The acting is stagey and deadpan, at moments even verging on slapstick. It’s a throwback to the old greats: Buster Keaton, Jacques Tati, Pierre Etaix. Kaurismäki even throws a blatant spotlight onto two of his characters in an amorous moment. He has constructed a staged, stumbling world where idealism clashes with authority. Marcel’s clumsy attempts to help someone other than himself for once are genuinely heart-warming. To take the saccharine edge off of this idealism, the film uses a colder palette and harsher lighting than your typical sepia-tinged fare. Le Havre is awash with blue, which allows small details like a red

rose in a hospital room to stand alone in beautiful singularity. Le Havre is a real one-off; an irrepressibly unique film. There are moments that will stay with you for their sheer surrealism - a policeman casually carrying a pineapple as he saunters into a bar, for example. The performances are perfectly in tune with one another, with some particularly good turns coming from André Wilms as our aging hero and Jean-Pierre Darroussin as the police inspector with a crisis of conscience. While it might not present an exacting study of France’s thorny issue of racism and immigration, Le Havre is proof that we always need to leave room for a little idealism.

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