He hasn’t made a huge success of his life, but a shoeshine man named Marcel Marx has a wife, a dog and a clean little shack in the port city of Le Havre.
He’s lucky to have that much, as his friends remind him. But Marcel, played by the weatherbeaten French actor Andre Wilms, is about to get a brief shot at redeeming a great deal of wasted existence.
This is the subject matter of “Le Havre,” a typically poker-faced film from the Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki, whose recent films include “The Man Without a Past” and “Lights in the Dusk.” Kaurismaki, now in his mid-50s, seems to be getting sweeter with age.
Hanging around the French waterfront as he does, Marcel discovers an African boy (Blondin Miguel), a refugee who’s trying to get to London. A police inspector (Jean-Pierre Daroussin) is determined to catch the kid and deport him.
Without particularly thinking about it, Marcel becomes intent on helping the boy. This episode happens at the same time as Marcel’s wife’s hospitalization, with an illness she doesn’t want to tell him about.
In other hands, all this might have been too sugary. But with Kaurismaki’s collection of odd characters (including a real-life white-haired rockabilly singer named Little Bob) and deadpan delivery, it becomes a truly winning combination.
Little details become funny without calling attention to themselves. When Marcel and a friend stage a “trendy” benefit concert, they carefully stamp each blank ticket, hand it to a customer, and then immediately collect it back. This shouldn’t be funny, but it is.
The whole thing has a “no big deal” aspect to it, as though all the effort and expense Marcel goes through to help this immigrant kid is really only slightly delaying him from his next trip to the neighborhood bar. He likes an aperitif before dinner, you understand, and his wife is patient enough to allow it in the family budget.
“Le Havre” also benefits from a strong sense of place: Kaurismaki doesn’t make pictorial movies, yet you get a fragrant impression of the harbor town and the people there. We sense that when the misfits have run out of regular living space, they end up at the seaside, in crumbling places along the lines of Le Havre. And those are people Kaurismaki likes very much.
“Le Havre” (31/2 stars)
A sweet-natured film from Finland’s Aki Kaurismaki, set in the French port of Le Havre: an immigrant kid from Africa is aided by an aged shoeshine man (Andre Wilms). This story could have been too sugary, but the director’s poker-faced approach keeps a “no big deal” aspect to the action. In French, with English subtitles.
Rated: Not rated; probably PG-13 for subject matter.
Showing: SIFF Cinema Uptown.
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