Starring Sherwan Haji. In Finnish, English, and Arabic, with English subtitles. Rated PG
Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki is a deadpan 2 stylist often compared to Jim Jarmusch, but hints of David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino drift into this beautifully composed comedy, which manages to hit raw nerves on the refugee crisis in northern Europe while poking fun at Scandinavian reserve.
Picking up themes suggested by his last effort, Le Havre—in which an African refugee bonds with an old shoeshiner in that French port city—this darkly colourful tale centres on one Syrian escapee (compelling first-timer Sherwan Haji) who washes up in Helsinki after an almost accidental sea voyage. Life in a detention centre, even one run by placid Scandinavians, is no bowl of hummus.
Khaled’s journey continues to go awry, and not in the expected ways. For him, salvation comes in the form of the film’s other subject, an aging gambler named Wikström (Kaurismäki regular Sakari Kuosmanen), who abruptly leaves his hard-drinking wife and boring job and impetuously purchases a restaurant in which the employees are just as unpromising as the menu. Basically, they’re a bunch of weirdos and dead-enders, but are impressed by Wikström’s fortitude, and eventually, when the two main stories meet up, supportive of his adoption of Khaled as an “illegal” who needs friendship, and food.
The budding restaurateur stands as an oldschool bulwark against skinheads, reactionaries, and people with no sense of humour. He also helps Khaled search for his sister, the only other family survivor of a massacre from above in their hometown of Aleppo. With its gloomy colours and homely fluorescent lighting, the movie constantly shifts between gentle, low-key humour and more threatening intrusions. That shouldn’t work, but it does. Kaurismäki seems to be saying, in three languages, “This is the world today; look how beautifully ugly it is!”
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Directed by Bertrand Tavernier. In French, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable
Born a decade after new-wave 2
godheads François Truffaut and Jean-luc Godard, Bertrand Tavernier experienced the movies as a sickly child after the Second World War. Perhaps still best-known for his definitive jazz movie Round Midnight, the venerable writer-director is well-placed to guide modern viewers through the back roads and main highways of one of the world’s great moviemaking cultures.
Addressing the camera, without the aid of identifying titles or subject headers, our white-haired auteur mixes colourful anecdotes with deeper analysis in this program, which demands, and rewards, close attention for its three-hour-plus running time. That’s actually condensed from the 10-part series that wrapped on French TV earlier this year. Without attempting to be comprehensive, the (relatively) more compact theatrical version is a surprisingly coherent overview, whether you’re a newcomer to the belle époque before the war or a lifelong fan of the nouvelle vague.
Our host doesn’t stint on the basics, but does privilege less familiar material, such as the pulp movies of Eddie Constantine, and he rebuilds the reputations of filmmakers like Marcel Carné and Jacques Becker, ignored or even trashed by the new wavers. There’s special attention paid to the many phases of Jean Gabin—bogart, Cagney, and John Wayne rolled into one durable brioche. (We learn that Gabin’s hair turned white after he joined the Allies to invade France in 1944.)
Tavernier doesn’t shy away from the less wholesome actions of Jean Renoir at the start of the war. First, the revered filmmaker was with the progressive Popular Front, then the Communists, and finally, when the occupation began, his brother Pierre later recalled, “I was afraid he was going to march right into the arms of the Germans.”
Renoir’s stature was inadvertently saved when he went to Hollywood for the duration. Screenwriter Jacques Prévert managed to work right through the occupation, providing cover for his Hungarian Jewish colleague Joseph Kosma, with whom he wrote “Autumn Leaves”. Tavernier spends much time on the composers who contributed mightily to the character of French film in all eras—in particular the tragic Maurice Jaubert, whose scores for early classics by Jean Vigo and René Clair might have been lost forever if Truffaut hadn’t paid to have them orchestrated and recorded in the 1970s.
Tidbits like that illustrate why this Journey is so worth taking. It’s far from over, as well.