Le Havre
Aki Kaurismäki (2011)
I don’t remember The Man Without a Past, Kaurismäki’s best-known film and the only one of his I’ve seen previously, except that I didn’t enjoy it much. I enjoyed going to Curzon Richmond yesterday but one reason for that, a glass of Prosecco, is why I won’t recall much of Le Havre either: I must have been asleep for a good quarter of an hour (it’s a short film anyway – 93 minutes). I didn’t fight to stay awake. This is the story of a sixty-something man in Le Havre whose beloved wife lies seriously ill in hospital and tells him not to come back and see her for a couple of weeks. During that time, he forms an attachment to an adolescent African boy – an illegal immigrant who’s trying to make his way across the Channel to join his mother in London. The elderly man is called Marcel and his wife’s name is Arletty. Marcel’s surname is Marx. The key figure among the team of local police and port officials is Monet. There’s an agreeable dog called Laika (the name of the first dog in space). Marcel makes a few bob as a shoeshine man. Jean-Pierre Léaud, always to be remembered as another boy heading towards the sea, has a cameo in the film. It’s hard for me to see what this assortment of references adds up to – in fact I don’t get Kaurismäki at all. His absurdist deadpan humour is greatly admired but I find it monotonous. Marcel’s first shoeshine customer moves off and gets himself killed. ‘Poor devil’, says Marcel’s sidekick. ‘Fortunately, he’d already paid’, replies Marcel. The woman who runs the neighbourhood bakery tells Marcel he doesn’t deserve Arletty. ‘No one does so it might as well be me’, is his answer. The immigrant boy Idrissa is looking miserable and Marcel asks if he’s been crying. Idrissa shakes his head. Marcel is relieved to hear it: ‘Just as well: it won’t help’. These one-liners are witty but once you’ve heard one you’ve heard them all. (These three examples are all taken from the film’s trailer, for obvious reasons.)
The contest in Le Havre – between eccentric, canny local underdogs and humourless, eventually incompetent authority – is reminiscent of some of the power struggles in Ealing comedy even if, in this case, the success of Marcel’s plan to get Idrissa safely on a boat to England depends on Monet changing sides too. When Arletty insists that Marcel not visit her for a while, she expects to be dead by the time he goes to see her again; when he returns to her room in the hospital, he finds an empty bed and a nurse tells him he can pick up his wife’s belongings later. It turns out, though, that she’s made an unexpected recovery. The couple return home; the cherry tree is in bloom; Arletty says she’ll get on making their evening meal (which is what she was doing when she fell ill). There’s no doubt this is a striking ending – it’s a happy one yet the outcome feels absurd as much as miraculous. The cast includes André Wilms (Marcel), Kati Outinen (Arletty), Jean-Pierre Darroussin (Monet) and Blondin Miguel (Idrissa). They’re a fine collection of faces – Kati Outinen is a particularly remarkable presence not just thanks to the strength of her acting but because she looks out of time (like a woman of the 1950s) and sounds out of place (with her Finnish French accent). I can’t fault any of the actors yet nothing they do does anything for me. The best thing in the film is the music played over the opening and closing titles – ‘Matelot’, a mid-1960s song by a British band called The Renegades, of whom I’d never heard. Along with The Renegades and the Prosecco, another nice thing about this visit to the cinema was being given a card by the guy at the box office to watch a free film on Curzon on Demand. Le Havre opened only yesterday but it’s available immediately to watch at home. I suppose I could use the voucher to see the parts of the film I was unconscious for but I don’t think I will.
6 April 2012