There’s no getting around the fact of political sentimentality in Aki Kaurismäki’s Le Havre. It addresses modern film audiences with the same complicity as Stanley Kramer movies of the ’50s and ’60s, which took the correct point of view on progressive social issues. Le Havre makes a hipster fairy tale out of illegal immigration through the story of an African boy, Idrissa (Blondin Miguel), who escapes his colonial outpost, gets stranded in France and is taken in by an old hipster Marcel Marx (Andre Wilms).
Finnish director Kaurismäki continues his deadpan style as an émigré in France but doesn’t lessen his social point-making (as in his previous, superior Lights in the Dusk). But it’s also humanistic point-making. Luc Besson made the same points as Le Havre, but made them sexier and spiritual in Angel-A (the Jamel Debbouze-Rie Rasmussen romance). Kaurismäki’s retrospective social signals are not Pop like Besson; Aki congratulates viewers on their connection to cinema’s liberal past.
Behind the film’s brightly colored, mundane situations and comically poker-face characterizations (peddlers, barflies, police officials, doctors, snitches) is a subtext of bohemians and outsiders from the history of French Poetic Realism to the anomie of the New World Order. Wilms’ unsmiling Marx is an obvious reference, so is his wife named Arletty (Kati Outinen).
Putting cinema’s history (from Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul to the Dardennes Brothers’ La Promesse) in the context of 21st-century globalism, Kaurismäki’s comedy also corrects some of the smugness of recent trendsetters such as Claire Denis’ postcolonial, masochistic White Material. Kaurismäki uses little Idrissa (no doubt named after the great Burkina Faso filmmaker Idrissa Ouedraogo) for guaranteed childhood charisma, but this is also the Finnish filmmaker’s answer to the quirky, warm humanism of Third World immigrants that Pedro Costa makes numbing. Kaurismäki’s embrace of human foible and eccentricity (facts that immigration brings to European consciousness) evokes the social portal of Jean Renoir’s La Bête Humaine, though in a lighter, genial mood.
Kaurismäki’s impassive style conceals its painstaking classicism; he’s as meticulously detailed as Ozu, which makes art-film watchers feel better about the sentimental responses they’d disdain in subjects closer to home. How far we have come since the early days of Kramer: Renoir brotherhood can be felt in a cameo by French New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Léaud as the creepiest of all anti-immigrant informers.
