Le Havre: waylaid in Normandy

Two shoeshiners, one French (André Wilms), the other a Vietnamese pretending to be Chinese (Quoc Dung Nguyen), stand together, scanning the passage of feet along the station floor, seeking to ply their trade. A man, his mouth like a hatchet wound, his hand cuffed to a suitcase, presents his right loafer for service, but soon he’s spotted by some other, equally suspicious-looking men. He runs, they chase, there’s gunfire. Another one bites the dust. The shoeshiners don’t even sigh. Clearly, it’s a dangerous world, one fraught with real, nasty, morally repugnant crimes... as well as crimes of a far more ambiguous nature.

Marcel Marx, the French shoeshiner, has been around; he once was a bohemian in Paris, or so he says, but now ekes out a humble but contented existence and comes home every night to a devoted wife and a very cute dog. Soon the wife will be hospitalized with cancer and in her place will appear an African boy named Idrissa (Blondin Miguel), whose clandestine journey by shipping container to the UK got interrupted and is now on the run in this forgotten French port city. Marcel can do nothing about his beloved’s illness but at least he can try to help the boy from harm’s way and secure his safe passage to London, where his mom works illegally in a Chinese laundry (but at least she works). Steering clear of the authorities, the enigmatic and ever-present Inspector Monet (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) especially, and shelling out for human smuggling costs won’t be easy, but our aging hero is determined and, just as importantly, unafraid to ask for help. “I’m not alone,” says Marcel. “I have friends.”

In his return to France (he made La Vie de Bohème there in 1992), Finnish wrier/director Aki Kaurismäki didn’t come alone either; he brought along Kati Outinen, star of eight previous Kaurismäkis and thus a sort of talisman, to play Marcel’s dear Arletty (named after the star of France’s beloved Les enfants du paradis), and bring a boldness and assurance to the film’s more problematic role. (Arletty’s wifely devotion, her refusal to even admit that she’s dying so that she can keep ironing Marcel’s clothes, cooking Marcel’s meals and managing Marcel’s paltry finances for as long as possible, can be a little hard to take; Le Havre’s Marxist cred is pretty impeccable, its feminist cred not so much.)

Both a love letter to French cinema and a letter bomb addressed to France’s xenophobic immigration policy makers, Le Havre, named for the Normandy city in which it’s set (which also happens to be the penultimate stop made by the sailors in Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante), brings Kaurismäki’s ongoing exploration of working class solidarity back to foreign shores, resulting in one of his finest, most affectionate, and probably most crowd-pleasing films. To be sure, Le Havre feels like a summation rather than any sort of renovation of Kaurismäki’s 30-year career, examining familiar themes and tropes—yep, there’s a rock and roll show, this one featuring the vocal stylings of Little Bob—and firmly grounding itself in that distinctive deadpan-melodrama, Bresson-does-Buster Keaton approach that filmgoers will recognize as Kaurismäki’s trademark. Yet for all that, the film feels very much alive, engaged and enraged, full of ragged but persistent hope, less resting on laurels than shaking them back to life. And in the truly remarkable scenes that find Kaurismäki's camera calmly fixing itself upon the faces of the (often real-life) undocumented foreigners, imposing nothing, we sense that no matter how persistently mannered this filmmaker's approach may be, he remains alert to the world, and allows his subjects their dignity, their chance to simply be present for his camera and for all of us around the world watching their faces, and hopefully wondering about their fate.

Workingman's blues: Aki Kaurismäki’s Proletariat Trilogy on DVD

He’s an ex-butcher with a drinking problem, currently slinging trash on the streets of Helsinki, maybe taking in a little bingo when the stars line up right. She’s a checkout girl no one ever checks out, with a hidden nurturing side, bandaging his hand when he comes in sporting a bloody injury. They don’t say much. His moustache is enormous and looks fake. She looks anemic. Maybe it isn’t paradise exactly, but there’s a genuine romance unfolding here, something hardly acknowledged in the blank facial expressions that mark both the acting style and the movie’s overall toughened-up, droll attitude towards life’s ordinary cruelties, but it’s expressed with singular eloquence in the close-up of the hand of this woman being kissed on a cold beach.

I’m talking about Nikander (Matti Pellonpää) and Ilona (Kati Outinen), the lovers on the run in Shadows in Paradise (1986), the first of three films that form Finnish writer/director Aki Kaurismäki’s ‘Proletariat Trilogy,’ newly boxed together by Eclipse, Criterion’s no-frills imprint. The trilogy wasn’t originally intended as such, and indeed, their themes, like the ubiquitous rock and roll performances, always happening somewhere in Helsinki’s bars, can be found in many other Kaurismäki movies. But they do share certain remarkable similarities that reward consecutive viewing: their quiet tributes to the haggard dignity and, in two out of three cases, redeeming solidarity of the working class; their endlessly playful interweaving of old Hollywood genre conventions, homages to Sirk, Ray and Hawks, into what would seem an ill-fitting aesthetic; and the use of starkly lyrical opening sequences constructed from images of hard work, sequences that instantly beguile and set the tone every time out.

The special brand of deadpan found in Kaurismäki’s movies could be called Bressonian comedy; it harkens back to certain silent era sensibilities, where melodrama is offset by nonplussed heroes; it found an odd kinship back in the 80s with the work of other highly individual filmmakers from very different cultures, such as Jim Jarmusch, who acknowledged the shared sensibility by casting Pellonpää in Night on Earth (91), and Takeshi Kitano, whose yakuza blow each other’s brains out with the same flattened gaze that marks Kaurismäki’s protagonists. It’s also a radical remedy for the facial gymnastic overkill of Jim Carrey. I guess it isn’t for everybody, but, in harmony with the disarmingly minimalist dialogues, the ruthlessly haiku-like editing scheme, the painterly, palpably lonesome compositions, and the often ingenious use of simple gestures to signify what other filmmakers might use ten minutes of exposition to convey, it’s an approach firmly invested in getting at something elemental in movies, stripping away at the trappings of cinematic storytelling to fulfill a particular truth about life and how the movies reflect it back at us.

Ariel (86) begins with the closing of a mine and of all prospects for the work force of some desolate town. Taisto (Turo Pajala) is given a white Cadillac by his father just before he fatally shoots himself. Taisto then up and leaves for the city, his breaking with the past announced with the collapse of the old barn where the Cadillac was stored only moments after he evacuates it. Helsinki welcomes him with only exploitive day-work, dingy flop houses and muggings, but he meets a saucy girl, divorced, with multiple jobs and a kid. Taisto is unfazed by these obstacles. In fact he decides right away they’re meant to be and she heartily agrees. The kid likes the idea, too.

But soon there’s crime and trouble, and later, with the introduction of a wonderful supporting character played by Pellonpää—who here resembles Gary Oldman as Commissioner Gordon—there comes a highly entertaining jail break, then still more trouble, then, just maybe, salvation in the form of some shadowy ship waiting in the night. This is neo-noir of an amusingly contained breed, its fatalism curbed by relentless faith in there always being one last chance at a better life, summed up in the Finnish rendition of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow.’

With his lanky frame, dark shades and crow-mullet, Pajala could be Nick Cave’s Finnish twin. The Match Factory Girl (90), contrasting its predecessors in its fable-like gloom and revenge-driven final act, might best be described as solid material for a Nick Cave song. After an ominous opening sequence in which a log is mercilessly shaved, shredded and whittled down to a mere tiny match, we follow the sad tale of Iris (Outinen), the daughter of morose parents more than happy to subsist off of her earnings. One night after the family silently dines at an expressionistically lit dinner table, the three of them watch coverage of Tiananmen Square on the television—is it in this moment that Iris realizes how far she is from real living? Far away, students risk their lives in the spirit of resistance, while in this tiny home no one even talks.

Not a word is spoken until 14 minutes in—the whole movie’s only 69 minutes long. The first line is: "A small beer." But Iris takes a chance, buys a red dress, meets a man, only to find herself fulfilling a prophecy announced by her crude and uncaring father. He calls her a whore, and, through no fault of her own, she's taken for one. The Match Factory Girl is far bleaker than most Kaurismäki movies, but it possesses a dark poetry that’s well worth surrendering to. An odd conclusion to this loosely connected trilogy, it’s true, but a wonderful turning point in a distinctive, still striking and ongoing career.