(Utopia: two world-weary adversaries struggling for the soul of a new Europe, in the lovely and unadorned Le Havre. Image courtesy of Janus Films.)
A new Aki Kaurismäki film is always welcome, especially since his recent output has been more leisurely than the frenetic mode he used to work in when I first got into his movies.
Character is destiny with him. In his Le Havre, the sardonic gallery of wastrels and solitary dreamers adroitly deploy words as weapons. They strip language to its purest form, to the point it is their primary survival mechanism negotiating the peculiar travails and absurdities of modern life.
The superb Andre Wilms beautifully incarnates the director’s craggy and unsentimental benchmark, a poet of the lower depths. Wilms works in the tradition of many Kaurismäki’s protagonists. He is a glorious anti-hero and weary romantic who proudly wears his anti-bourgeois sentiment as a rebuke of popular tastes and mass fashions.
The new film, the director’s first French-language feature since La vie de boheme nearly two decades ago, synthesizes disparate forms and styles. It gloriously luxuriates in the director’s funhouse of rock and roll, formal beauty and deadpan humor. It’s not isolated or set apart but attuned to a collective experience. Kaurismäki shapes it within a larger political context.
The plot, suggesting an updating of the Howard Hawks’s 1944 film To Have and Have Not, relates a typical Hawksian thread of the reluctant hero drawn into service by his developing conscience to right a grievous wrong.
One of the film’s marvels is how shrewdly and self-effacingly it pays tribute to the characters, made explicit here by the eccentric presence and outsized characterizations of the various dock workers, merchants, nurses and bar tenders that hover around the proceedings. They imbue the work with a layered, almost musical sense of voices (like all of Kaurismäki’s films, the faces are remarkable, both weathered and evocative, suggesting a wealth of experience, heartbreak and pain).
Wilms goes by the improbable, fantastic name of Marcel Marx; he’s a writer of local repute known for his extravagant and expensive drinking tastes (“Your bill is as long as the Nile,” says one local merchant). He carefully plots out his days of casual refinement. He now lives in exile in the eponymous French seaport as a bawdy teller of tales who derives a fanciful income as a shoe shiner.
The tone and humor is set right at the start, the camera catching Wilms and his associate from a tilted angle in the midst of trying to scare up some customers. A group of mysterious figures enters the frame, their motives probably not terribly pure. Just as Marcel completes his work on one of the dapper man in his trench coat, we hear a series of gunshots. “What a poor devil,” Marcel’s friend remarks. It’s good he already paid, Marcel remarks.
Marcel is raffish and clever, but he’s clearly in love with his long-suffering and willing-to-put-up with anything wife, Arletty (Kaurismäki regular Kati Outinen). When illness necessitates Arletty’s hospitalization (she cannily withholds from him just how grave her condition is), Marcel suddenly becomes a man of action.
The catalyst is his chance encounter with Idrissa (Blondin Miguel), an illegal African émigré desperate to meet up with his mother in London. Marcel’s opposite number is Inspector Monet (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), the taciturn, world weary cop who’s been assigned to locate the boy after the kid escaped from custody after the police discovered a group of African migrants stashed away in a shipping container. Marcel’s own detective work helps him locate the boy’s grandfather, who informs him about the boy’s mother.
To the extent that Le Havre is concerned with plot, Marcel uses his underworld connections to find a willing transport for the boy provided he could raise the $3,000 euros. He convinces a local rock legend, Robert Piazza (the sublime “Little Bob”) to do a charity gig. Le Havre is beguiling, tough, free work.
Kaurismäki is working in his preferred form, but the tone is elastic and deeply humane, evidenced by the sharp and emotionally buoyant secondary characters, like the luminous local barmaid Yvette (Evelyne Didi). She deepens the movie’s grace and texture, giving it a particular glow.
The movie sharply melds old and new, classic Hollywood with groundbreaking French works (nouvelle vague icon Jean-Pierre Leaud turns up as a “denouncer,” or rat). The details emerge through the director’s meticulous, beautifully upholstered creation.
Kaurismäki alternates between studio-bound sets that deploy gorgeous, stylized lighting with open air and location work that creates a pungent and distinctive atmosphere. The jokes have a great sting, sly, funny and alert, like a local businessman, who confronted by the cops and asked to explain his own motivation, simply replies: “I love my country.”
The jokes are not just aural though visual, the most spectacular set piece an extended visual riff involving a seemingly shopworn gag, Marcel toting around a pineapple that in the elaborately choreographed camerawork achieves a moment worthy of Keaton.
Kaurismäki has always mined a very Scandinavian brand of humor that freely mixes laughter and self-recognition with a lacerating pain. The colors here are razor-sharp (the great cinematography is by Timo Salminen), but the mood is playful and optimistic, teasing out the possibility of hope and wonder.
Le Havre celebrates the past, but just as important, its maker finds a glorious reason to be alive and kicking.
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