• Toivon tuolla puolen (The Other Side of Hope)

6/4/22 (Sat)

In Aki Kaurismäki’s Le Havre (2011), an older working-class man losing his wife to cancer encounters an African migrant fleeing the law and works to help him. In his The Other Side of Hope (2017), an older working-class man losing his wife to divorce encounters a Syrian migrant fleeing the law and works to help him. The setting shifts from Le Havre to Helsinki and the language from French to Finnish/English/Arabic, but the big change is the shift in focus from the rescuer to the rescued, who is drawn more sharply and plays a more active role in the latter film. Significantly, the first film is about ensuring that the migrant leaves France and reaches the UK, while the second is about welcoming migrants into the society in question.

Waldemar has impassively separated from his wife and removes his wedding ring, which she casually tosses into an ashtray. He leaves his shirt retailing business and decides after a fruitful night at the casino to take over a failing restaurant. Among his hires is a Syrian migrant, whose application for asylum has been turned down by Finnish authorities on the grounds that Aleppo is not particularly dangerous. (They should have looked at the television news, which featured plentiful images of the city being bombed to submission.) Having employed the man, Waldemar now seeks to help him survive there, including the search for a sister who became separated from him during their escape from the Syrian war.

The director has flattened all emotions, so that surprise, joy, tragedy and anger all feel the same. Most reviews seem to have agreed on the word “deadpan” to describe this, giving it a nice spin, but the actors come off like Bunraku puppets performing without the benefit of a narrator to fill in the blanks. In one lovely scene, the migrant picks up a sitar at the refugee center and starts playing an evocative tune from his homeland to the rapt attention of the other migrants, a beautiful moment bringing together people from various cultures – and us as well. But the director then cuts that off mid-song and switches abruptly to the next scene without any emotional payoff. I suppose he wanted to avoid lapsing into sentimentality, but that lapse would actually have been most welcome at this point.

Similarly, when the brother, after a desperate search that has lasted since the start of the film, finally meets up with his sole surviving sister, their emotions are so muted that the scene is utterly meaningless. Shouldn’t he be thrilled that she’s been brought to safety? Shouldn’t she be relieved that she made it past the border inspectors after her perilous trip, hidden in a tiny compartment under the trunk of a large truck? I guess not. The director does his best to try to inject feeling into this – “Remember how I used to tease you when you were a baby girl?” “No” – but is unable to achieve any chemistry between the two despite the fact that the actors themselves are siblings.

In an amusing restaurant scene, the hapless owner goes Japanese in an attempt to increase business. Realizing too late that he’s low on raw fish, he throws huge dollops of wasabi onto pickled herring and rice and calls it sushi. The staff, decked out in Japanesque wear, welcomes a Japanese tour group with the typical Japanese greeting “Irasshaimase” (English subtitle: “Irasshaimase”), suggesting hilarity to come. I assumed there would be some reaction at least to all that wasabi. But he skips over the entire meal and goes directly to the crowd leaving the restaurant dispassionately with no indication of how the meal was received. I don’t get it.

The ending was a bit of a mystery, though it was probably intended as such. The migrant has been stabbed by a far-rightist (who ironically calls him a Jewboy) and lies on the shore nursing his wound when the dog from the shop runs up and licks him, a sign that the restaurant owner has come looking for him. It’s a take that suggests a positive answer to the title, though the film immediately cuts off at that point.

The film wants to humanize the migrants who poured by the upper hundreds of thousands into Europe during the Syrian crisis, and it succeeds in humanizing this one. The director was reportedly considering at one point make another film on the same theme for a migrant trilogy; hopefully he’ll offer a story showing the influx of unknown migrants from the perspective of the Finns. I wouldn’t want to imagine a US version of this film, which would throw the delicate balance into a much more overtly politicized and sentimental direction. Still, the approach here was conversely too detached to draw us in. The film is enjoyable enough with its eccentric cast of characters and great musical interludes of Finnish rockabilly (I’ll be buying the soundtrack), but it could definitely use a shot of normal human emotion.