The Other Side of Hope
THE OTHER SIDE OF HOPE, not rated, in various languages with subtitles, Center for Contemporary Arts, 3 chiles
Aki Kaurismäki, the great Finnish director, has a deadpan style, a visual flair, and an offbeat sense of humor that can call to mind David Lynch with a heart. His last picture, back in 2011, was Le Havre, which dealt with an illegal immigrant African kid in that French port city and the middle-aged shoeshine man who helps him. It was the opening salvo in what Kaurismäki now projects as a “refugee trilogy,” and he now brings the second entry to the screen.
In The Other Side of Hope, the illegal is Khaled (Sherwan Haji), a refugee from war-devastated Aleppo. Kaurismäki introduces him covered with soot as he emerges from a freighter in Helsinki, an accidental stowaway buried in a pile of coal.
This is a two-pronged story. The other prong belongs to Wikström (Sakari Kuosmanen), a doughy, middle- aged Finnish shirt salesman looking to change his life. He declares his intent in a wordless scene in which he packs a bag, stops by the kitchen table where his wife is smoking a cigarette and drinking, deposits his house keys and wedding ring, and walks out the door.
It takes quite a while for the two stories to come together. Khaled cleans up and reports himself to the authorities, where he is kept in detention and interviewed to determine if he will be granted political asylum. The story he recounts of his flight from Syria is horrific, but in Kaurismäki’s deadpan tradition, he tells it without inflection or dramatics. While Khaled awaits the verdict of the immigration office, he desperately tries to get word of his sister, the only other member of his large family to survive the terror back home.
Wikström, meanwhile, has sold off his stock of shirts, parlayed the proceeds via a high-stakes poker game into a sizeable nest egg, and plowed his profits into the purchase of a restaurant. He’s a pragmatic, no-nonsense guy, but beneath his dour exterior beats a heart, which we see in his dealings with his inherited restaurant staff, who are a lovely collection of oddballs.
And we see it when Khaled, on the lam, turns up at the restaurant. They exchange punches in the nose, and then Wikström hires the fugitive, even giving him a place to live. He’s the kind of guy who would give you the shirt off his back, so to speak.
Kaurismäki loves music, and the film is strewn with middle-aged folkrockers busking on the streets or playing in bars. He loves people, and so it’s also filled with humanity, and a gentle cry for tolerance and acceptance of the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free. There’s a droll sense of the absurd, and the contortions that Wikström puts his restaurant through to try to stay hip and solvent are wonderful to see.
The film ends on an odd note, almost as if Kaurismäki ran out of film and decided to roll the end credits. But the movie has plenty to say along the way, and says it with style. — Jonathan Richards