Kaurismäki: Le Havre (2011)

For the most part, Kaurismäki’s drollness stems from a certain disconnect between his characters and his mise-en-scenes. Time and again, he focuses on drifters and losers who live empty, banal, squalid lives, but are forced to do so against bright, prefabricated backdrops that continually pressure them to conform to their fairytale co-ordinates. What’s striking about Le Havre, then, is that it is a fairytale – in this encounter between an old French shoeshiner (Andre Wilms) and a young African immigrant (Blondin Miguel) every conceivable complication turns out happily, meaning that it’s the first of Kaurismäki’s films in which the characters actually seem to live in the same world as their mise-en-scenes. That’s a bit of a double-edged sword: since those mise-en-scenes are palpably plastic in their good cheer, there’s also a certain plasticity and artificiality to the film’s optimism. As a result, the film’s possibly even more stilted than Kaurismäki’s previous efforts – it’s just that the stiltedness isn’t so much between the characters and their world as a principle of the world itself. That gives Kaurismäki the opportunity to hold his pauses, beats and blanknesses for longer than ever before, until the entire film takes on something like the archaic, elemental blocking and body language of the classical Western. And it feels like Kaurismäki is, ultimately, outlining something like a new frontier here – it’s reputed to be the first in a trilogy of films shot in major European port towns and, like in any frontier town, sympathies and affilitaions are more urgent than they might otherwise be, meaning that the degree zero of the film's plastic optimism is a quite robust, genuine sense of class solidarity, much of it revolving around the city’s country and western music scene. It’s proof that Kaurismäki’s backdrops were never quite offered in bad faith, and that his drollness always contained the kernel of a more generous, inclusive comic vision – and it’s that crystallisation that makes it such an entrancing and magical film, distilling his portside jukeboxes into the lonesome saloons they always evoked, in what can only be described as his first real comedy, in the richest sense of the word.