Le Havre

As a pub­lic fig­ure, Finland’s mas­ter of the retro dead­pan fairy tale, Aki Kau­ris­mä­ki, appears to go out of his way to present him­self as a can­tan­ker­ous, gin-soaked mis­an­thrope. Yet the devo­tion­al rev­er­ence with which he cre­ates and talks about cin­e­ma would sug­gest oth­er­wise. It’s clear he’s a big softy at heart.

Le Havre is his first new work since 2006’s hang-dog odyssey, Lights in the Dusk, and from the very open­ing frames it presents a direc­tor who’s out to remind the world why we fell in love with him in the first place.

This is, in the very loos­est sense, a film about the prob­lem of peo­ple-traf­fick­ing, though Kaurismäki’s inter­est in the minu­ti­ae of con­tem­po­rary pol­i­tics amounts to less than zero. Le Havre is a human­ist fable about the nature of good­ness that would’ve prob­a­bly had Capra rum­mag­ing for his Kleenex as the lights came up. It also exam­ines how soci­ety and the indi­vid­ual have con­flict­ing def­i­n­i­tions of what com­pris­es a good deed.

André Wilms, an actor whose majes­ti­cal­ly crum­pled vis­age exudes life and expe­ri­ence, plays a shoeshine named Mar­cel Marx. As an act of no-strings-attached com­pas­sion, he decides to take a young African stow­away named Idris­sa (Blondin Miguel) under his wing and help him to con­nect with his fam­i­ly in London.

All this despite an extreme­ly mea­gre income and the recent hos­pi­tal­i­sa­tion of his dot­ing wife, Arlet­ty (Kau­ris­mä­ki reg­u­lar, Kati Out­i­nen), for what appears to be a life-threat­en­ing stom­ach ailment.

If Mar­cel rep­re­sents the indi­vid­ual, then Jean-Pierre Darroussin’s wily Inspec­tor Mon­et is the moral sword of Damo­cles wield­ed by soci­ety at large, on con­stant watch as Mar­cel goes about his sup­pos­ed­ly nefar­i­ous busi­ness. Tan­ta­lis­ing sub­plots flesh out the close-knit com­mu­ni­ty, not least Marcel’s rela­tion­ships with a local boulanger and an Asian immi­grant named Chang.

By its final reel, when the fruits of Marcel’s phil­an­thropic endeav­ours have mate­ri­alised (includ­ing an ad-hoc local rock ben­e­fit begrudg­ing­ly head­lined by Le Havre’s answer to Elvis, Lit­tle Bob), Kaurismäki’s film gen­tly floats into the realms of the magical.

Yet the poten­tial was there from the off, as the direc­tor has point­ed­ly suf­fused his mate­r­i­al with roman­tic allu­sions to clas­sic French cin­e­ma: Inspec­tor Mon­et, with his tipped Hom­burg and rain­coat, is pure Melville; Mon­et and Marcel’s strained mutu­al respect recalls Gabin and von Stern­berg in Renoir’s La Grande Illu­sion; and Arlet­ty pays lip ser­vice to the star of Mar­cel Carné’s melo­dra­ma, Les Enfants du Par­adis. This is the real world shot through with romance.

Those famil­iar with the trade­mark visu­al mode of Kau­ris­mä­ki and cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Timo Salmi­nen will find with Le Havre it’s a case of old hands work­ing at the pin­na­cle of their wist­ful­ly iron­ic game. Each shot is pared down to its core con­stituents, yet every­thing remains exhaust­ing­ly rich and poetic.

Marcel’s sparse­ly dec­o­rat­ed abode is espe­cial­ly res­o­nant: the walls washed in steel blue and the del­i­cate, still-life plac­ing of orna­ments and pic­tures tell us all we need to know about Marcel’s fru­gal, lone­some exis­tence. Here is a direc­tor who can make ​’60s formi­ca cof­fee tables throb with sad­ness. He’s that good.