A sweet story right to the Finnish

It’s been six years since the last feature from Finland’s Aki Kaurismaki, but the director’s focus hasn’t much changed. Le Havre in 2011 told the story of a French shoeshine man who adopts a young Gabonese refugee who arrives in the French port via shipping container. This time the man is an amateur restaurateur, the refugee is from Syria and the setting is Finland, but the social conscience and gentle humour remain the same.

The twin tales take a while to intertwine. On the one hand we have Wikstrom (Kaurismaki regular Sakari Kuosmanen), who leaves his wife and clothing business and, thanks to an impromptu win in a poker game, buys a struggling restaurant and its jaded staff. On the other there’s Khaled (newcomer Sherwan Haji), who arrives in Helsinki on a coal ship, and whose first order of business (after a shower) is to apply for asylum.

Kaurismaki has set up an interesting parallel — the Finn who decides on a whim to embark on a new life, and the Syrian who has no choice but to do so. Khaled lost touch with his sister and only surviving relative during their flight, and wants desperately to find her, but the authorities decide that Aleppo is just safe enough that he should be sent back. Terrified, he flees.

When the two men finally meet, Wikstrom proves a valuable ally, and a humane contrast to the local neo-Nazis who have been troubling Khaled. He gives the refugee room and board and a job, rather comically handing him a wad of cash and then grabbing some of it back: “This is tax,” he explains. Then, to boost the restaurant’s fortunes he decides to go into sushi; he buys Japanese decorations and costumes and a cookbook but, alas, not enough fish. His solution to the last problem is characteristically Finnish.

The Other Side of Hope is a sweet story, though occasionally lacking in subtlety; Kaurismaki seems worried we might side with the skinheads, and goes out of his way to make Khaled sympathetic in almost every respect. But given the lot of refugees around the world, you can perhaps forgive the filmmaker his caution. The Other Side of Hope opens Dec. 8 in Quebec City, Toronto, Waterloo and Charlottetown, and Dec. 15 in Vancouver and London, Ont., with other cities to follow.

Sherwan Haji