LE HAVRE
A film by Aki
Kaurismäki
2011 / Finland-France
/ Runtime 93 minutes
5.45 pm / 29th Nov /
Perks Mini Theater
Le Havre is a a perfect, deadpan, impishly optimistic fairy
tale from the great Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki. Le Havre offers the
director’s usual humour, pitch-perfect acting and compassionate message. It is set
in the French port city where many of the cargoes are human: illegal
immigrants arriving from Africa. The film's hero, Marcel Marx with no plan in
mind becomes in charge of protecting a migrant African boy from arrest.
The movie's other characters are all proletarians from a
working-class neighborhood. We meet Marcel's wife, Arletty (Kati Outinen), who
joins her husband in his scheme. Marcel and Arletty are long and happily in
love. They cherish each other. Childless, they care for the boy and enlist
others in the neighborhood to hide him from Inspector Monet.
Filmed in a high, nostalgic style that gives its setting the
gleam and romance of another era, "Le Havre" is a movie composed
entirely of fantastic faces. Another classic Kaurismäki characteristic very
much in evidence is his vivid and idiosyncratic use of color. Working with his
regular cinematographer Timo Salminen and French set designer Wouter Zoon, the
director does wonderful things with a pastel palette and loves to put
unexpected visual accents where you least expect them.
This movie is as lovable as a silent comedy, which it could
have been. It takes place in a world that seems cruel and heartless, but look
at the lengths Marcel goes to find Idrissa's father in a refugee camp and raise
money to send the boy to join his mother in England. Finnish film maker
Kaurismaki has set his story of timely
issues and timeless values in the French port city of the title. (Source:Internet)
Aki Kaurismäki
Aki Kaurismäki was born in Finland in 1957. After graduating
in media studies from the University of Tampere, He started his career as a
co-screenwriter and actor in films made by his older brother, Mika Kaurismäki.
His debut as an independent director was Crime and Punishment (1983), an
adaptation of Dostoyevsky's novel set in modern Helsinki. He gained worldwide
attention with Leningrad Cowboys Go To America. Kaurismäki has been influenced
by the French directors Jean-Pierre Melville and Robert Bresson. He has tried and managed to stick totally to the
inseparable realities of the real world. His minimalist style is all his own (and that
of the great cinematographer of all his films, Timo Salminen); he never entered
the Finnish Film School (as he was suspected to be "too cynical").
Much of Kaurismäki's work is centred on Helsinki, such as
the film Calamari Union, the Proletariat trilogy (Shadows in Paradise, Ariel
and The Match Factory Girl) and the Finland trilogy (Drifting Clouds, The Man
Without a Past and Lights in the Dusk). His vision of Helsinki is critical and
singularly unromantic. Indeed, his characters often speak about how they wish
to get away from Helsinki. Some end up in Mexico (Ariel), others in Estonia
(Shadows in Paradise, Calamari Union, and Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatjana).
The setting of most of his films is the 1980s, or at least contains elements
from that decade. Kaurismäki is, in fact, almost single-handedly responsible
for rejuvenating the failing Finnish film industry in the 1980s with a series
of highly original comedies made with his brother Mika. Over the past twenty
years, Kaurismäki has become one of the pre-eminent auteurs of international
art cinema, fusing minimalism and melodrama to poignantly depict the hardships
of Finland’s blue-collar class.
