Le Havre (film group notes)

　

　
1.

The people who voted for Donald Trump in the South and Midwest are poorly educated for the most part but they were raised Christian and many of them are kind and generous people. It is well within the realm of possibility that such people might behave compassionately when confronted with an individual illegal immigrant. Most people behave kindly by reflex.

Someone said that Trump’s Louisiana supporters, taken as individuals, are the most courteous and welcoming people in the United States – they will give you the shirt off their backs. The problem arises when they join together as a group. By some sinister alchemy, a group of gentle, even, courtly individuals turns into an intolerant mob braying for blood.

Although Aki Kaurismaki’s LeHavre is a poetic fantasy, a sort of fairy tale, there is no reason to think that it is not within hailing distance of the truth.

　

2.

Aki Kaurismaki is Finland’s most well-known film maker. He is idolized in Helsinki to the extent that he is featured on stamps issued by Suomi, as Finland calls itself.

Kaurismaki was born in 1957. He began directing films in 1983 and has 18 credits. His most recent film, The Other Side of Hope, was premiered in Berlin in February 2017. The movie was awarded a Silver Bear for best director and has been universally acclaimed.

In Berlin, Kaurismaki announced that he was retiring from filmmaking and that The Other Side of Hope would be his last picture.

Kaurismaki has made two trilogies – the so-called Proletariat trilogy consisting of Shadows in Paradise, Ariel, and Match Factory Girl and the Finland trilogy: Drifting Clouds, Man without a Past, and Lights in the Dark. When LeHavre was released to great critical acclaim in 2011, Kaurismaki announced that it would be the first part of a trilogy of films about harbor cities – the next film was to be made in Spain to be followed by film made in Germany. Kaurismaki seems to have abandoned this plan.

Most of Kaurismaki’s films can be described as very dry, deadpan comedies. He is associated with the rock group, the Leningrad Cowboys, and has also made a trilogy of films featuring that band: The Leningrad Cowboys Go America, The Leningrad Cowboys meet Moses, and a documentary The Total Balalaika Show, about a huge open air concert held in Helsinki but featuring Russian performers as well – the playlist included "Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door," and "Sweet Home Alabama."

When its cold and dark in Finland, Kaurismaki lives in Portugal. When the daylight lasts all night in Helsinki, Kaurismaki lives in Finland.

3.

Poetic realism is a style developed in France between 1933 and 1945. Films of this kind involve star-crossed lovers generally portrayed against a background of lower class or lower middle class life. Male protagonists are washed-up petty criminals or hardscrabble laborers; women are often world-weary barmaids or prostitutes. The films often feature urban or rural landscapes, not conventionally pretty, but filmed according the canons of impressionist art. Characters speak gangster argot mixed with poetry. Chance and coincidence play an important part in these films. The cycle begins with Jean Vigo’s L’Atlanta, a 1933 film about newly weds honeymooning on a barge on the Seine. L’Atlanta frequently turns up on ten-best films of all time lists and it is revered by Kaurismaki. A film that is decisive as an influence on Le Havre is Marcel Carne’s Le Quai des Brumes (1938), a movie about a doomed dusk-to-dawn love-affair involving a washed-up army deserter and a 17-year old runaway hiding in a squalid bar in a harbor town. The film’s title Port of Shadows describes the all-encompassing fog that characterizes the nocturnal images in the film. Everyone in the movie chain-smokes and Jean Gabin, as the hero, cuts his bread and sausage with a switchblade. The criminals all have hearts-of-gold but this doesn’t save them from the operations of fate.

Kati Outinen, the female lead in Le Havre, is a well-known actress in Finland and has been in many of Kaurismaki’s films – she is a kind of muse to the director. (In Japan, Outinen is renowned for being the woman with "the saddest face in the world.") In his film, Kaurismaki names her Arletty as a hommage to the French actress of that name whose work with Marcel Carne characterizes the genre of poetic realism. (Arletty appears in Carne’s 1938 Hotel du Nord, Le Jour sa Leve in 1939, Les Visiteurs du Soir in 1942, and the immense epic Children of Paradise shot over a two year period during the French Occupation and released in 1945. These four pictures represent the summit of poetic realism.) Kaurismaki says that he admires these films because the characters are invested with the tragic dignity of wartime.

Many examples of poetic realism may be found in Kaurismaki’s Le Havre. Consider, for instance, the figure of the Chief Inspector, the formidable Inspector Monet, who, notwithstanding his name (which would seem to signal an Impressionistic efflorescence), is always clad from head to toe in black and, even, wears black gloves. Two other influences on Le Havre are noteworthy –the films of Yasujiro Ozu and the cinema of Robert Bresson. Le Havre stages many of its dialogue shots by simply having the actor speak directly into the camera and, then, cutting between the two participants in the colloquy – this is how Ozu directs dialogue in his later films. (The final shot showing a cherry tree in blossom is also an allusion to Ozu’s influence on this picture.) Like Ozu, Kaurismaki designs his film with the utmost graphic elegance – he adds little touches of color to otherwise monochrome shots and composes his images with exquisite clarity – Le Havre is one of the most beautiful films ever made. The influence of Bresson’s minimalist style is seen in the opening sequence – we see people’s feet as they walk, a trademark of Bresson’s films, and, then, there is a murder scene staged entirely in the reactions to the crime by bystanders. A later scene in which the villain, an informant played by Jean-Pierre Leaud seizes the African immigrants arm, also demonstrates Bresson’s elliptical precision in depicting action. We see a close-up of Leaud’s hand grasping the African boy’s wrist, but, then, a third hand appears – this is Chang, the hero’s sidekick, intervening to save the child from arrest. Here the film’s mise-en-scene is a model of both economy and concise clarity.

Formalist critics distinguish between a film’s fabula (the story that it tells) and the manner in which the story is told, its syuzhet – the distinction, made by Russian theorists, is generally between the tale and its telling. On its face, Le Havre’s fabula is very sentimental and maudlin: a group of kindhearted people work cooperatively so that a lost child can be reunited with his mother. Melodramatic sentiment is also courted by plot elements involving a loveable dog, a woman who is dying of cancer, and eccentric but loyal citizens involved in the conspiracy to do good. Kaurismaki’s syuzhet, however, is so dry, terse, and elliptical that the astringency of his narrative technique opposes (or counteracts) the maudlin tendencies in the fabula – this is an example of a deadpan narrative style that undercuts the risk of excessive sentimentality intrinsic to the plot. Fantasy or surreal elements of the narrative – for instance, the pristine appearance of the people trapped in the shipping container – also establish "quotation marks" around the story; we are conscious that the melodramatic tale is a contrivance – characters and events are stylized so that we read the film not as an account of real events but, lyrically, as a poetic response to themes involving immigration, the status of the stranger in a community, love between mature adults, and, even, the use of the word "terrorist."

Some critics broaden the concept of the fabula to include not merely the skeletal or bare bones account of events comprising the plot, but also to include a simple statement of the film’s theme. In the case of Le Havre, Kaurismaki’s theme is also very sentimental and, even, problematic, a theme that runs through many fairy tales: those who are good and do good because of their purity of heart will be rewarded. This is a theme that most people would be ashamed to articulate since it contradicts the evidence of our senses, that is, the cynical assumptions with which we customarily armor ourselves to face the world. Again, Kaurismaki hazards this theme, and gets away with its presentation, primarily because of his very hip and minimalist syuzhet – each shot is exquisitely color coordinated and carefully composed; the camera doesn’t shake or wobble around: the narrative unfolds according to rigorous pictorial principles that are the opposite of documentary realism. We can’t escape the nature of this film as an artifact, as the product of elaborate craft – but we may agree that the formal theme of the film (that good acts, although they are their own reward, are also rewarded in the natural scheme of things) is a contrivance, an element of wish fulfilment just as the "look" of the film (austere, geometric, and beautiful) represents another kind of wish fulfilment – if only the world were as clean and elegant as the pictures in this movie.

Kaurismaki is often linked with the minimalist film makers, most particularly the New York director Jim Jarmusch. However, despite the low-key brevity of Kaurismaki’s film making in Le Havre, the film clearly aspires to the fairy-tale poetry of Carne’s films.

　

4.

In 1992, Kaurismaki directed a much-praised version of Henri Murger’s La Vie du Boheme ("The Lives of the Bohemians"), the book about struggling artists in Paris that was the basis for Puccini’s opera La Boheme. The hero of that film was played by Andre Wilms, the actor in Le Havre, who performs the part of the protagonist, Marcel Marx. The hero’s name comes from Kaurismaki’s La Vie du Boheme – Andre Wilms character in that film was also called Marcel Marx.



Kaurismaki has Marcel Marx say to the boy Idrissa that he was once an artist, and that he lived la vie Boheme dans Paris ("the life of a Bohemian in Paris").

　

5.

Kaurismaki detests digital film making and has called it "the devil’s invention." In interviews, he says: "Real film is light; digital is electricity." An example of the preternatural light effects that Kaurismaki achieves in this film are the scenes that simply show Arletty asleep in her hospital bed – these are ravishing images worthy of Vermeer. Similarly, shots depicting Marcel Marx, rim-lit with a golden radiance as he smokes have an unearthly beauty – this is an element of "poetic realism", investing scenes of ordinary life with extraordinary lyricism. Kaurismaki is not willing to make a movie using digital technology and this, perhaps, accounts for his retirement from film making.

Kaurismaki purchased Ingmar Bergman’s motion picture camera after the Swedish director retired from film-making. Since acquiring that instrument, he has made all of his films with that camera. All technicians on Kaurismaki’s crew are Finnish members of his repertoire company – he always works with the same technical crew.

　

6.

"French rock ‘n’ roll is like British wine."

Little Bob is an Italian-born, French rock star, famous primarily for his concerts and recordings in the seventies. His sudden appearance in the film is conspicuously ad hoc and feels improvised. It’s a plot contrivance that is implausible and that Kaurismaki doesn’t really attempt to realistically ground in his narrative. (Compare Little Bob’s appearance in the film with the careful way that Kaurismaki establishes the parcel containing the yellow dress that Marcel Marx is supposed to bring to the hospital; Kaurismaki lavishes several shots on the preparation of this parcel since it will play a vital role in the mise-en-scene at the film’s climax. By contrast, Little Bob comes out of nowhere, performs, and, then, vanishes from the film.)

It’s hard not to see Little Bob as a homage to Mickey Rooney in the films he made with Judy Garland in the late thirties and forties – most particularly, Babes in Arms. In these pictures, a group of kids decides to put on a show, often for a good cause. The adults don’t think this will succeed and act in a patronizing way. But the show, of course, is dynamite.

　


Optimism

In Cannes, Aki Kaurismaki described the film’s optimism in these terms: "I’m tender in my old age."

He said: "I see no hope for mankind. I don’t want to any harm. Since I see no hope for mankind, I don’t want to add to the pain. So I make films that are supposed to be entertaining."

　

　


Some Production Notes

Kaurismaki claims that he drove the Mediterranean coast to Spain, then, the Atlantic coast from Portugal north to Le Havre, scouting for locations for this film. The last town that he reached was Le Havre and, at first, he rejected that place as a location for the film – the harbor was too modern and the town was cheerless and cold. On his way out of the town, he noticed an area comprised of 15 or 20 blocks at the waterfront that looked unlike the rest of the city. This was the part of the city that the Allies did not bomb during the War – that is, the old harbor town. This tangle of streets intrigued Kaurismaki.

Kaurismaki also liked the fact that Le Havre has a leftist history – it was the last town to have a Communist mayor in France. Kaurismaki has said in an interview that "Le Havre looks as lonely as I feel." Both Kaurismaki and his cameraman, Timo Salminen, commented on the quality of light in Le Havre – "it is very white, creamy..." Le Havre means "the Haven".

Asked at Cannes whether the film was set in the past, Kaurismaki shrugged off the question saying – "it was made in 2011 and shows the world in 2011." But this doesn’t account for the antique automobiles in the film? Kaurismaki noted that he owns an 1951 Chevy and that a car "survives much longer than its birth year." In any event, he has said: "My films are like museums. I put old things in them that I like."

Kaurismaki doesn’t speak French. Of course, this posed difficulties during the production because he was working with a French cast with the exception of Kati Outinen, who knows some French. (In the script, Kaurismaki explains her poor French by saying "she is Rumanian or something.") Further complicating the production was the fact that Kaurismaki never shoots more than two takes and, in fact, for economic reasons, only prints one of the takes. This means that the actors have to get their lines delivered correctly on the first try. Kaurismaki directed "musically" – that is, by the sound of the voices and inflections. He doesn’t explain motivation or tell the actor how to do his or her job. He views his role as making certain that the actor’s execute their parts with precision – that is, requiring that the stand exactly where he wants them to stand, that they gesture exactly as he has demonstrated, that, when a character sets something down, he puts it exactly where Kaurismaki wants the object to be placed. This is an element of the director’s extreme precision in the way his films are made. Kaurismaki told Wilms that he was to act like "an old gentleman" (speaking to him in English) and to show "great dignity." He said to Wilms that he was to use his eyes "like a combination of Buster Keaton and Robert Mitchum". Kaurismaki said he cast Wilms because of his big nose – "it’s like mine," Kaurismaki said, "you can smoke in the shower." This is not a joke – Kaurismaki smokes in the shower and everywhere else.