• Le Havre

5/7/22 (Sat), home

A charming offbeat 2011 French-language comedy by Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki. Marcel Marx (André Wilms, wonderful), whose character has gone from bohemian author in a previous film (La Vie de Bohème) to shoeshine man in the port city of Le Havre, comes across a young African migrant on the run from immigration authorities. When the kid follows him home, Marcel decides to help, hiding the boy in his small home to keep him out of the clutches of a Javert-like inspector. Some detective work by Marcel, using scraps of information and a quick trip to a migrant camp in Calais, reveals that the boy’s mother is living in London. The question then becomes how to smuggle the kid to the UK amid the watchful eyes of authorities, not least how to raise the money to accomplish that. Marcel earns the instant cooperation of neighbors in his tiny community who have not always thought the best of him – a boulangerie owner hides the kid when Marcel is away, the vegetable shop man throws in extra food, a boat owner agrees to transport the child to British handlers, a club agrees to a charity concert by a local celebrity to raise the money for the smugglers. Marcel’s life is complicated by the fact that his wife is hospitalized with what he has been told is a minor problem; in fact, she has been given little chance to live. (Doctor: “Well, miracles do happen.” Wife: “Not in my neighborhood.”) The stories are tied together in the end as Marcel’s good deeds are ultimately repaid by just such a miracle.

The film avoids falling into an overtly political tone. The boy barely registers as a character: he is unfailingly polite, obedient and soft-spoken, as migrants tend to be, but is mainly just a plot device with no real personality of his own. That will inevitably be seen by some as a patronizing portrait of a heroic white man rescuing a poor black boy, but the situation feels real enough to me (and the visuals are easier with a black child than, say, a Syrian migrant). The director has a spare style that works beautifully with the understated script, such as the sequence at the end when the man goes to his wife’s hospital room and ominously finds nothing but the unwrapped package that he brought earlier – a great setup for what’s to come.

The material is helped immeasurably by Wilms’ unassuming performance as the lead as well as Jean-Pierre Darroussin’s inspector, which is a fun riff on a would-be noir character. Kaurismäki regular Kati Outinen as Marcel’s dying wife has a severe style that contrasts sharply with the lighter tone of everyone else, thus standing out in a not-so-good way. But the rest of the cast is excellent. The diminutive Little Bob, the singer who agrees to do the charity concert (on condition that his wife reconciles with him – it’s complicated), is apparently a real-life local rocker and a sight to behold. Jean-Pierre Léaud, the legend from The 400 Blows, makes a surprise appearance in a small role as an informer.

When migrants are discovered at the opening hidden in a container at the shipyards, I thought we were in for a 90-minute lecture. But the film is about basic humanity rather than politics, a refreshing and much more subtle approach. A lovely film.