The Other Side of Hope

Finnish film-maker, Aki Kaurismaki, makes movies on a human scale.  In his 2017 picture, The Other Side of Hope, there is a scene in which a Finnish wheeler-dealer and his minions seek a hiding place for a Syrian refugee.  Someone uses a yardstick to measure the refugee who is on the lam from the authorities, and announces that he will not fit in to a cooler recess in the entrepreneur's restaurant.  A scene later, the man is ensconced in a storage room where the Finn warehoused dress shirts -- he was formerly a traveling shirt salesman.  The room isn't particularly comfortable but it's exactly the right size.  The dimensions of this room, which forms an explicit theme in the film, correlates to Kaurismaki's style of directing:  there is nothing too large and nothing too small.  The restaurant in the film is about the size of a living room in one of today's tasteless McMansions.  The movie features small groups of people.  When the businessman converts his restaurant into a dance-hall, about seven couples dance -- not twenty or thirty.  During musical interludes, we see combos performing to crowds that are about thirty or forty people.  Everything is modestly scaled -- that is, built to human dimensions.  And this correlates to the movie's modesty, it's sobriety and fundamental human decency.

In The Other Side of Hope, Khalid, a Syrian refugee, literally claws his way out of a heap of coal on a freight ship and, then, hikes from the Helsinki harbor downtown to take a shower and turn himself into the police.  He announces that he is seeking asylum. Kaurismaki's Helsinki is a greyish-blue matter-of-fact place with street buskers on its corner and lots of unpretentious bars.  At the outset, Kaurismaki uses the time-honored technique of cross-cutting parallel action to establish a cinematic relationship between Khalid and his other hero, Waldemar, the traveling shirt salesman who has apparently dumped his middle-aged girlfriend and, equipped with a huge American car, gone to find his fortune in the restaurant business.  Waldemar is on the brink of old age, a big man who looks like a mob boss from an American thirties or forties gangster movie.  He is immaculately dressed and exudes an aura of competence and, perhaps, menace.  Like Khalid, Waldemar finds himself a displaced person.  He parlays his inventory of shirts into cash and, then, invests in a high-stakes poker game with other elderly, and sinister-looking, gentlemen.  Kaurismaki is making a kind of fairy-tale, and, so, of course, Waldemar wins a small fortune at the poker table (although he also comes within a hair's breadth of being murdered, it seems, by the proprietors of the place -- a suggestion that is matter of almost imperceptible looks and nods).  Waldemar invests the money in a small restaurant in a low-rent part of town.  Of course, ultimately, Khalid makes his way to the restaurant where he does odd-jobs.  Waldemar, although he acts tough and is exceptionally laconic, is a kind man and, with his rather roguish staff, acts instinctively to protect and conceal the Syrian.  (Khalid's bid for asylum has been inexplicably denied because Aleppo, his hometown, is "no longer dangerous" according to a three-judge panel  -- an idiotic ruling announced in the midst of Assad's campaign to slaughter the inhabitants of that city as shown in alarming TV broadcast footage.  The remainder of the film chronicles Waldemar's comical attempts to increase profits at the restaurant -- this aspect of the film presented with the driest of dry humor, reminded me a bit of the restaurnat subplot in Mike Leigh's great Life is Sweet -- and Khalid's attempts to find his sister who was separated from him in the Balkans,

The Other Side of Hope is the second of Kaurismaki's planned trilogy about harbors, now re-dubbed by the director as his "refugee trilogy."  Kaurismaki previously made films about underdogs, the losers in the economic race, and he is superbly equipped to document the hardships and indignities suffered by refugees -- in modern Europe, they are, after all, the ultimate underdogs.  The first of these films is the completely charming Le Havre, a movie about an African boy who hides among the demi-monde living in a French town.  The Other Side of Hope is more realistic in some ways, but still a kind of parable in which good outwits evil -- in the case of the latter picture, the authorities who are searching for the "illegal" immigrants.  The essence of  these films is summarized by a sequence in The Other Side of Hope involving a Finnish right-wing skinhead organization called "The Finnish Liberation Army", this inscribed in English in sequins on their jackets.  The Army seemingly consists of only three lads, but they are mean-looking and big.  When Khalid leaves a concert, the bad guys pursue him, rough him up, and, then, prepare to set him on fire with lighter fluid.  Just as he is about to be ignited, a group of six or so Finnish bums, all of them apparently drunk and some on crutches, stagger up, knock down the skinheads with their half-empty bottles of booze and give them a beating.  The cavalry has come to the rescue but they are an odd sort of heroes -- disabled alcoholics, superannuated bikers, and the elderly greasers, rock-a-billy types with mullets or long braided blonde hair, that Kaurismaki prefers as protagonists in his films.  These people know what it's like to be marginalized and they protect their own. 

Although The Other Side of Hope is a sort of fairy-tale, exquisitely shot and edited (Kaurismaki is one of the great directors with respect to the technical aspects of his films), it doesn't sugar-coat the situation.  Khalid's entire family has been slaughtered in a bomb attack and the skinheads carry knives and are, potentially, lethal.  The officials managing the immigration program are well-meaning morons.  In an interview Khalid says that he has "buried the Prophet with all the angels," when he dug the graves for his family in Syria.  "So should I put down for religion 'Atheist'?" the nice-looking blonde lady interviewing him asks.   "No," he says.  "I will write 'not religious'," she replies.  Nonetheless, in a world full of films about criminal conspiracies, Kaurismaki depicts a "conspiracy of the good," plots hatched by kind people to help the hapless strangers in their midst.  The two refugee films show that it is hard to do good as an individual -- you need a group of like-minded people to implement your plot to make the world a better place,  Kaurismaki's benign conspirators are washed-up criminals, small-timers, old men and women, dilapidated alcoholics and old-time musicians who never quite made it.  The film is punctuated with musical interludes, beautifully if very objectively shot:  making music together as a group is Kaurismaki's metaphor for the pursuit of goodness in the world. 

In an interview in Berlin, the dour Kaurismaki (sucking an vape-cigarette) said a number of indelible things about his movie and the refugee crisis.  "How has Europe forgotten that sixty years ago, there were 60 million refugees in Europe?"  and "Today, the refugees are Syrians and Africans,  But tomorrow they could be you and me."  Kaurismaki said:  "I made the film not only to change Finland, but to change the world, and so I hope the three people who paid to see the picture will do that..."  It goes without saying that the movie deserves to be seen by everyone.