the millennium kids

Plugging myself into the grid.

Aki Kaurismaki’s LE HAVRE

Aki Kaurismaki’s Le Havre opened last weekend here in Boston and my enthusiasm for it is in line with damn near everyone else’s. However, with the company I keep it’s been seen as much less than touted—I was going to write about it anyway, but this disagreement gave me a reason to offer a more spirited defense.

Le Havre primarily involves four characters: Marcel Marx, a shoeshine; Idrissa, a Senegalese boy attempting to illegally make passage to London; Monet, an inspector charged with finding the boy; and Arletty, Marcel’s wife, whose terminal illness is unbeknownst to her husband. It falls on Marx and his neighbors to secure Idrissa a safe route home to England.

The story of Le Havre sounds like something akin to Ramin Bahrani’s work, with its multicultural, working-class motifs; and, indeed, given to Bahrani it could easily and properly be turned into a devastating portrayal of the injustices visited upon France’s immigrant community. But instead, Kaurismaki, to his credit, supplants kitchen sink realism with warmness and levity—a decision completely appropriate to his characters and their hospitality, but too often unseen as filmmakers choose instead to fetishize despair and the so-called poetry of decay.

Kaurismaki’s humanism expresses itself in opposition to kneejerk neorealist impulses in its carefully manipulated color schemes and its insertions of farcical humor, but perhaps most of all in its insistence on allowing its characters to achieve their fullest dignity—the fatalism of the ghetto be damned.

My friends who disagree with me over the film decry the whimsical interludes as ‘nonsense,’ and surely the humor is quite dryly absurd; at one point, Marcel gains entry to a refugee detention center by claiming to be of the inhabitant’s albino brother. Personally, I found all this charming; but there must be something going on here besides me being a sap and my enemies being heartless. So what is it?

Importantly, we must not confuse Kaurismaki’s efforts with someone like Robert Benigni’s—this isn’t the full stop abandonment of social realism nor a disgraced effort to convert lived misery into ironic laughs. Kaurismaki’s film is not ignorant of the hardships and indignities that meet the lower class, quite the contrary; there are moments of revealed mourning and the tone is not of overcoming but of making peace with. Jean-Pierre Darroussin’s Inspector Monet (in my favorite performance of the year) moves and speaks with the subtle efficiencies of aged professionals, everything having been done before, all duties seemingly circular; Chang, Marcel’s frequent professional companion, lets it be known one night that he has lived his entire life in France under an assumed alias so as not to be deported, and he seems aware of but unbothered by what this admission implies; Arletty scolds Marcel for bringing her expensive flowers at the hospital.

There are other examples, but the point should be made: Kaurismaki’s film is ‘feel-good,’ but by no means is he stating that lower-class life in France is a whole lot of fun if only you look hard enough. His generosity to his story is not sentimental or opportunistic; instead, it seems lived through, hard-won. In Ramin Bahrani’s Chop Shop, after everything that could go wrong does go wrong, it ends with the protagonist smiling at a group of pigeons; it’s this kind of allowably ironic, pitiable happiness that Kaurismaki finds so appallingly reductive. Le Havre ends with everything that could go right going right, including Arletty’s miraculous recovery; and the last shot is the couple looking at a blooming cherry tree, as if to signify a happily-ever-after. Of course, this isn’t true; J. Hoberman calls the film ‘utopian precisely because it shows everything as it is not.’ He’s right—but I find the end of Le Havre much less trite than that of something like Chop Shop. In the latter, the understanding of the ephemerality of these moments of happiness yields to a kind of knowingness that puts the audience in a position of power over the character, a dramatic irony where the viewer is more savvy of the character’s misery than they are; in Kaurismaki’s film, this power does not exist and both the director and his characters partake in this understanding; it yields not to a vain knowingness but a shared reflection.

I don’t find this to be pandering to cliche, nor do I find it the most congratulatory type of wish-fulfillment; I find it heartfelt in the truest sense. The final shot of the blooming cherry tree recalls, whether intentionally or not, A.E. Houseman’s ‘Loveliest of Trees,’ and the poem and the film share a similar involvement with the somewhat dutiful, but nonetheless gratifying pleasures to be had in a long life.

Unlike many other directors whose work revolves around the working-class, Kaurismaki is not interested in extracting particularities; nor is he overtly interested in reinforcing the myth of a kindler, more noble lower-class; in place of these he proposes a more radical proposition—that no matter how fractured we are as a group (be it as an immigrant community or as members of a class), our common experiences cement us together. Le Havre is not about placing faith in the kindness of strangers—it’s about giving us the belief that the people on whose kindnesses we depend may not, in fact, be strangers after all.

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Watch the trailer here.

NOTE: I don’t hate Ramin Bahrani or anything; he’s only used by name as an example. Broadly speaking, the opposite of a film like Le Havre is ‘poverty porn,’ best seen in films like Slumdog Millionaire—which speaks only to the obliviousness of its creators—or Precious, which is pure condescension through and through. Bahrani remains one of the most established, credible purveyors of ‘poverty porn;’ his films are much better than most, but could be argued to exist on an identical continuum. For this, see Richard Brody’s reply to A.O. Scott regarding ‘neo-neo-realism.’ I’m particularly fond of his phrase regarding how these films ‘cut off a wide range of aesthetic possibilities and experiences on ostensible grounds of virtue.’ This is what Le Havre does best: widens the range of aesthetic possibilities.

  1. nathanfisher posted this