THE OTHER SIDE OF HOPE (Aki Kaurismäki). 101 minutes. Subtitled. Opens Friday (December 8). See listing. Rating: NNNN
Aki Kaurismäki’s been telling the same stories for decades now. His films are about unlikely connections that make the world a little warmer for the people in it. From Lights In The Dusk to The Man Without A Past, and The Match Factory Girl to Drifting Clouds, they’re all about compassion and an abiding faith that people will heed their better angels.
His latest, The Other Side Of Hope, reworks the premise of his 2011 drama, Le Havre, with an older European once again helping a displaced person from the Middle East find his way in a new country, but just six years later the state of the world imbues that plot with considerably more urgency.
Here, as a Finnish restaurateur (Sakari Kuosmanen) tries to keep a Syrian refugee (Sherwan Haji) safe from deportation, it’s impossible to avoid thinking of real-world equivalents, both in Europe and North America. Indeed, in the three months between the film’s TIFF bow and its Toronto release, there have been dozens.
Rather than descend into the bleak hopelessness that defines so much contemporary European cinema, Kaurismäki’s film offers comfort, imagining a society in which more people care about others than do not. In a way, it’s a sympathetic cousin to documentaries like Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow, which focus on refugees but also acknowledge the people who are there to help them to safety and shelter.
This film is just as warm and thoughtful as the rest of Kaurismäki’s body of work, and you might just feel a stab of regret that this story still needs telling.
