Le Havre Review

• 9th Aug 2012

In Le Havre, the 17th film from Finnish émigré filmmaker, Aki Kaurismäki is at the same time both a light hearted drama and a political drama with a dark story. It centres on a shoeshiner who lives in the coastal town of Le Havre and struggles to make a living but always willing to help others. He is married to Arletty who is terminally ill but is keeping this from her husband. One day the shoeshiner, called Marcel Marx decides to help a refugee kid from Gambon on transit to London called Idrissa escape from the authorities and with the help of friends and the local community they hide him away from the police. Marcel takes the extreme lengths of going to a refugee centre (more like a prison) in Calais to seek out the boy’s grandfather who gives him an address of Idrissa’s mother in London while helping him gain safe passage.

This is a heartwarming story from Kaurismäki who uses some classic Hollywood principles to drive the narrative but with some distinctly modern issues such as migration and dispossession. Over the past five or six years filmmakers have made many films about migrants and the struggle in the diaspora. On the surface it seems a very severe and downbeat tale but Kaurismäki who infuses it with such hope and humanity that it somehow works. It doesn’t have the dark despair of a film from last year about illegal migrants, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Biutiful. Whereas the aforementioned film was very bleak this one is light and cheery where even the bleak working-class neighborhoods are painted in a luminous painterly hue so typical of the director’s style. Although it looks as though he does, Kaurismäki does not use digital film and relies on more traditional methods of using Kodak film but is never the less able to create luminous colours in the most somber of scenes. Kaurismäki also considers himself a migrant (he now lives in Portugal) and rants often about his former land, but of course he was not a refugee in the same sense as Idriss. This is his second film in France (the first was La Vie de Boheme, 1992) and feels very much like a French film from a native filmmaker with more French chanson music than a Jeunet and Caro film. The film draws throughout on elements that will resonate with the French public: from the chanson music which resonates throughout the soundtrack to the names of many of the characters: Marx (although not French it was Marxism that inspired the 1968 student uprising), Arletty (a famous French chanteuse) and Monet (the painter).

The director most certainly seems to be referencing classic cinema in his references to Italian neo-realism, Douglas Sirk and the use of Jean-Pierre Leaud more familiar from the films from Francois Truffaut as the informer on Marcel. This is a piece of witty irony as Leaud had originally played a young rebellious runaway in Les 400 Coups (1959) in what was Truffaut’s second film. If I am going to be critical of this film, I did find it and many of its characters idealized and the surprise ending with Arletty more than a little unbelievable even if film is artifice and many of the elements of the film relies on goodness and fantasy. Still Kaurismäki remains forever the optimist when as he says “I have become more optimistic over the years, because the hope is gone”. How refreshing then that this film has two happy endings.

Chris Hick