Toivon tuolla puolen
Ari Kaurismäki (2017)
Khaled (Sherwan Haji), a thirtyish Syrian refugee, arrives in Finland as a stowaway on a coal freighter. He didn’t mean to get there: he was living in Gdansk when, to evade a gang of neo-Nazis, he took refuge on the ship, whose destination turned out to be Helsinki. Khaled is anxiously waiting for contact from his sister, from whom he’s been separated since their respective departures from Aleppo. Wikström (Sakari Kuosmanen) abandons his job as a travelling salesman and leaves his wife (Kati Outinen), who has a drink problem. He goes on a poker tour and wins enough money to buy a rundown restaurant in Helsinki. He keeps on the previous owner’s three staff (Janne Hyytiäinen, Maria Järvenhelmi and Ilkka Koivula). The venture doesn’t prosper. Both these narrative strands in Ari Kaurismäki’s new film are infused with the writer-director’s characteristic absurdist humour, though the prevailing register is different in each. The sequences at the failing restaurant are largely comical, those dealing with Khaled’s experiences as an asylum seeker more serious. Khaled’s application for asylum fails. He escapes from a refugee centre to avoid deportation and ends up sleeping rough by the rubbish bins outside Wikström’s restaurant. At this point, around halfway through The Other Side of Hope, the two storylines converge. The sense of humour common to both in the earlier stages helps the film achieve a satisfyingly unified tone
Le Havre (2011), Kaurismäki’s previous picture, had a fundamentally similar scenario – the unlikely pairing of a young migrant-on-the-run and a protective older man – but I got much more out of The Other Side of Hope. Kaurismäki’s style is particularly effective in telling Khaled’s story. The sustained understatement crystallises the precarity and deracination of the asylum seeker’s existence. The eschewal of melodramatic incident reinforces its reality. The persistent ironic humour ensures the film is never pompous. For me, the more explicit comedy in the restaurant doesn’t work so well. One effect of the unrelenting deadpan is that the punchlines tend to be predictable. (That may be intentional but it leaves this viewer as straight-faced as the actor delivering the line.) An employee tells Wikström his predecessor was a bit unreliable when it came to paying wages; the new boss asks in what way; it’s obvious the answer will be: ‘He didn’t pay wages’. I laughed only at the broadest comedy, when the restaurant has a short-lived makeover as a sushi bar and the stolidly eccentric, decidedly Northern European staff are kitted out in Oriental costume. Khaled has joined their number by now, in exchange for safe custody at the restaurant. In his Japanese outfit, he bears a passing, surprising resemblance to Toshiro Mifune.
The trailer for The Other Side of Hope ends with a clip of Khaled saying to Mazdak (Simon Al-Bazoon), an Iraqi refugee whom he befriends, ‘I fell in love with Finland – but please find a way out of here’. This led me to expect a cynical parable, presenting the refugee experience in Europe as so grim that a young Syrian man wasn’t merely homesick but actually tried to return whence he came. I was relieved to be wrong. Kaurismäki is a pessimist but not an out-and-out misanthrope. He gives the Finnish authorities – police and food hygiene inspectors, as well as immigration officers – a hard time. At the end of the film, Khaled’s future is more uncertain than ever, thanks to a stab wound from a right-wing thug. But there’s human decency and courage in evidence too: from Wikström (he eventually makes up with his wife, who’s stayed on the wagon since his departure); from the truck driver who agrees a deal with Wikström to bring Khaled’s sister (Niroz Haji) into Finland in his lorry, after she’s been located in Lithuania.
Le Havre was enlivened by the 1960s pop song ‘Matelot’ on the soundtrack. Music plays a larger part in The Other Side of Hope, in the form of live performances in the bars and on the streets of Helsinki – ‘twangy blues and rock’n’roll, wistful folk music’ (Ryan Gilbey). Some of the subtitling isn’t so hot. When a character says, ‘I’d forgotten that whole guy’, it may be a literal translation of the Finnish but it’s not English. (It presumably means, ‘I’d completely forgotten about that guy’.)
26 May 2017
