“Always different, always the same”: John Peel’s famous description of The Fall applies equally well to the work of the melancholy Finnish minimalist Aki Kaurismäki. The 59-year-old has been writing and directing for more than 30 years, scarcely tweaking his formula of woebegone absurdism. His films, which include the knockabout Leningrad Cowboys Go America and the poignant Cannes Grand Prix-winner The Man Without a Past, are mostly set in the Finland that time forgot, where there is scant evidence that things have progressed beyond the 1950s. Vodka, rockabilly, Brylcreem and smokes are the order of the day; they are the only things that lighten life’s load. Along with kindness and companionship, which sprout unexpectedly in the gloom like spring daffodils in February.
Kaurismäki’s The Other Side of Hope builds on the minuscule changes present in his 2011 film, Le Havre, which concerned an ageing shoe shiner who shelters a young African migrant on the run from police. That hot-off-the-press story was infused with the director’s usual sensibility, resulting in a mix of the urgently topical and the snugly familiar. This pleasing effect continues in the new picture, which interlaces the struggles of two men who have fled their homes. The first is Khaled (Sherwan Haji), a Syrian asylum seeker who arrives in Helsinki as a stowaway on a coal freighter. The second escapee doesn’t undertake quite such a hazardous journey. Wikström (Sakari Kuosmanen) walks out on his alcoholic wife, wins a fortune at poker and buys a failing restaurant called the Golden Pint, which has cobwebs on the crockery and a cook who sleeps standing up with a cigarette between his lips.
The Finn and the Syrian meet eventually, bopping one another on the nose and staunching the blood with matching tufts of tissue paper. Only in a Kaurismäki film could this represent the start of a beautiful friendship. Wikström may be a grizzled old potato-face (“Do your friends call you Wally?” someone asks. “I have no friends,” he snaps.) But, as with Kaurismäki himself, the lugubriousness only makes the occasional shafts of light shine that much brighter. The older man becomes a protector of sorts to Khaled, mirroring the relationship in Le Havre. He organises a forged ID card and gives him a job at the restaurant as it undergoes an ill-advised makeover into a sushi joint, where wasabi is served in eye-watering scoops like pistachio ice-cream. Wikström also tries to help Khaled find his sister, who got left behind en route.
So how did he make it all the way to Finland? “Easily. No one wants to see me.” The film, on the other hand, goes to great lengths to illuminate the experience of Khaled and others like him. Without sacrificing his usual drollery, Kaurismäki explores the humdrum reality of what it might mean to be a refugee, and ends up finding common ground between these lost souls and the usual outsiders and misfits who populate his work. Hearing an Iraqi refugee giving advice to Khaled (look happy, he says, because “the melancholy ones are always deported first”), it’s easy to see how this very modern story is consistent with the Kaurismäki back catalogue.
For all the film’s gentleness, this is no idealised world. Khaled has some upsetting run-ins with fascist thugs – on one occasion he is saved by a raggedy posse of rough-sleepers, but the film doesn’t pretend things always turn out so sweetly. This is, after all, a portrait of loneliness and disenfranchisement. Live musical performances on street corners and in bars – twangy blues and rock’n’roll, wistful folk music – express emotions that don’t always come easily to these reined-in, buttoned-up dreamers with faraway eyes.
There aren’t really any surprises in The Other Side of Hope; it’s more like witnessing the ongoing cultivation of a humane philosophy. But the film is devilishly funny, economically constructed (the demise of Wikström’s marriage is shown in wordless images) and decked out in the director’s dismal palette of cobalt blue, moss green and burnt-marmalade orange. (Should the film work ever dry up, he could make a killing as an interior designer for doleful hipsters.) If there is one mild shock, it is the absence of the Kaurismäki family dog, Laika, who always usually puts in an appearance. Is she dead? Retiring? Has she been deported? It could be a story fit for his next film.
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