The Other Side of Hope

Probably Kaurismaki’s most topical film, this is a paean to the pluck and courage of the immigrant and to the humanity of the citizens who support them. It may cover the same plot and emotional territory of his Le Havre (2011) but the European and American debate over immigration gives it a new urgency.

The title works two ways. The desperate Khaled seems beyond hope when he pulls himself out of a coal bin. He escapes battered Aleppo only to be rejected by the Finnish asylum board. 

But the timely kindness he gets from strangers is also beyond anything he could realistically hope for. Street people magically materialize to drive off the redneck Liberation front determined to kill the “camel rider.” The Iraqi refugee and the blonde worker he befriends at the centre reveal an indefatigable generosity. 

Khaled fulfills is mission to save his sister Miriam (evoking the earlier emigre Moses and his sister Miriam) thanks to the generosity of the truck-driver and Khaled’s own resolve to cling to his fading life long enough to see her through. Like Moses, Khaled doesn’t get to the promised land either.

Khaled’s chief support turns out to be Wikstrom, an unlikely hero in any other vision but Kaurismaki’s. Wikstrom is a traveling shirt salesman whom we meet as he abandons his woebegone wife. Seeking renewal, Wikstrom buys a down-at-heels restaurant which he struggles to revive — along with the downtrodden staff the previous owner had exploited and abused. 

The bond between Khaled and Wikstrom begins when they quarrel over home space. Wikstrom won’t let the Syrian sleep in his garbage area. They exchange nose punches, then Wikstrom feeds him and provides a job, fake ID and a storage unit home. 

Wikstrom’s generosity ends up saving his staff, then Miriam, and ultimately even his wife. His leaving shook her out of her alcoholism and she’s running her own modest business. They resume their marriage and she will be his new hostess. 

So the film traces two men’s unusual transcendence, the immigrant and the salesman. Of course, in Kaurismaki’s usual tone, there are no large emotions or grandiose effects. The faces are all proletarian, plain, appealing in humanity not beauty. Conversations are banal, silent stares long, baleful, empty. The camera rarely moves and very little ever happens — just the quiet unfolding of people with small, tender and moving lives. 
     Wikstrom finances his restaurant purchase at a big stake poker game. In the climactic hand he’s up against four aces — as strong a hand as one can expect. But Wikstrom’s winning straight flush is the lowest denomination you can get: the two, three, four, five and six of clubs. That moment encapsulates Kaurismaki’s vision and style. The lowly, the most unprepossessing and bathetic, they win because they are the bedrock of humanity. 

Land of the Little People

A guerrilla war over land in Israel would normally be waged between Israelis and Palestinians. Here it’s between two deserters from the Israeli army and four young Israeli kids. Their fight is over territory — an abandoned camp and dried well — and arms, specifically one soldier’s pistol. 

The obvious parallel is Lord of the Flies, where an isolated mini-society of children creates its own religion, power structure and savagery. Only the arrival of an adult military restores civilization. The Israeli setting makes this version less about the decay of civilization than about the effect upon children of the continuing presence of war.

Initially the children seem to be playing at being Hollywood savages, with their bows and cross-bows (however upgraded with laser). They whoop in triumph at trapping a field rodent. They’re not playing at being soldiers but at being mythic. 

When they drop the carcass down the deserted well, though, they are playing at something rather more serious and geographically pertinent. They are making up a religion, with their own goddess whom to satiate with sacrifices in order to preserve themselves. 

This turns the children’s savagery away from play and towards the more serious matter, religion. It makes them a more serious parody of the larger forces in their real world. Alternatively, it shows them turning away from the religion that is at real war and finding comfort in an invented ritual. 

The girl seems to have cast their well-dwelling deity as a woman, eschewing the patriarchal tradition. Her goddess may derive out of her father having died heroically at war. She survives. The children’s religious pretence gives them a kind of maturity, as if they are reliving the origin of one of the older faiths of the region.
     Conversely, there’s something childish about the deserters, their bantering, insults, horseplay, petulant excuses for deserting, and their ultimate helplessness. Far from conscientious objectors, they have failed to meet their adult responsibilities.

Israel doesn’t use child soldiers. Here the deserters are soldiers proven immature and the children play at adult missions. Both the real and the play warriors show the effects of growing up in this constant danger. 

The children in particular are at their most vulnerable, most period of life. A prepubescent couple, with two even younger friends, they are pre-sexual. They are verging. 

Sex is there but not for them. The older boy briefly spots a mother having sex then darts away. When the four see two naked swimmers on the beach they watch briefly then scatter them with a gunshot. Fascinated with photos of one soldier with his girlfriend, they use them as bait to draw him into the trees. The wounded soldier quickly assures the boys “I didn’t touch her” when they find him clutching the young girl’s arm. Two of the mothers are distracted by their pregnancy. This heightens the children’s vulnerability even as they assume an adult mission.

A lesser war here is familial. One boy stole and wrecked his older brother’s bike, so is targeted for violent revenge. “He’ll kill you.” He doesn’t help his cause when he urinates on him from a bridge. In another replay of Israel, then, on both sides of the main war there are violent internal divisions, between the brothers as well as between the deserters. The brothers’ battle is stopped by their army fathers’ return. Like the battleship that closes Lord of the Flies.

All this action unwinds under the shadow of an unspecified IDF action against some provocation, unspecified. “Are we at war?”  one kid asks, as planes roar by above. Israel is in an unending state of siege. That takes its toll. That climate is the film’s subject.

     Hence the Theodore Herzl quote that opens the film: People will live and die for a flag — if they’re taught to. Coming from the father of modern Zionism, that is hardly a criticism of Israel. Rather it’s a recognition of the gnawing costs of unending war. The micro embodies the macro. This is the land of little people indeed, small malevolences perpetuating an invented cause, violent games turning fatal. 

Les grandes esprits

The English title — The Teacher — is a serious deviation from the original French: Les grandes esprits. Esprit can mean mind or spirit. The great mind will be open to differences in spirit. The title shifts the emphasis from the students to the teacher, from the fringe immigrant class to the privileged white man, from the great spirits to the conventional disciplinarian. 

In the posh Paris school where we meet him, M. Foucault is equally generous complimenting the good students and insulting the majority.  He carries that insulting manner to his new school, which at first sight looks like a prison but turns out to be an open, generally comfortable institution despite its lower standards and achievement. Teachers even let their classes have tea parties. 

These marginalized kids are the “great spirits” of the title, wild, energetic, undisciplined, yet detached by their inability to escape their expectation of inevitable failure. The classes are predominantly black but the students appear happy, well-dressed, and for the most part obedient. But the school admin and teachers are relentlessly white. 

  The chief lesson in the film is the well-regarded teacher Foucault’s conversion from assuming unassailable superiority to trying to help his disadvantaged charges succeed. He stops judging them to help them. When he leaves his highly regarded Paris school for the disdained suburb -- i.e., The Immigrants -- he opens himself to new growth as a teacher and as a human. Of course, “Foucault” alludes to the seminal thinker in the Left’s current cultural theory. 

      The film’s Foucault gradually mends his ways to get through to his new class. He countenances their cheating and alters his teaching strategy and class topics to let his students feel some success. Once he breaks their expectation of failure they have a chance to succeed. 

Seydou, whom Foucault initially calls stupid, develops a new self-respect, a new interest, a new courage. He ultimately eschews the gang life to return to school.

Foucault’s success with Seydou is at least in part due to his taking a personal interest in him beyond the classroom. He advises him how to impress his romantic interest Maya, then intervenes to reverse the boy’s expulsion. This turns his most antagonistic pupil into a friend. In perhaps the film’s most touching moment, Seydou sits beside Foucault after the choir performance, each bemoaning his own romantic failure.  

Foucault’s strategy alienates some of his more conventional — and self-concerned — colleagues, who think he is courting cheap popularity by his generous grading. Seydou’s expulsion is presumably caused by his antipathetic maths teacher, who resents his girl-friend Chloe’s friendship with Foucault. 

Foucault is given an interesting background. Even the successful teacher still moves in the shadow of his father, a very famous author who may be “the TV guy” a student cites. There’s a chill in the father’s signing his book to his son. Foucault’s sister is an international figure developing an artists’ residence in Tokyo. So the teacher’s reputation and his command of his classroom may still fall short of his family’s status. 

Foucault apparently has no personal life.  He is clearly out of his element at his new colleagues’ party. He seems to be courting the Ministry woman when he suggests more experienced teachers be assigned to the suburbs. He mistakes her lunch invitation to be a personal date and is disappointed when it turns out to be a business meeting — at which he finds himself trapped in the one-year school transfer.  

His romantic hopes are dashed again when Chloe leaves with her lover for Canada. The result is to define him totally as the teacher. Outside that function he is nothing. With heroic selflessness he learns to serve and to liberate the great spirits of his underprivileged students. But he remains restricted in himself.

The film has an interesting political underpinning. Indeed its primary focus may be culture not education. In emphasizing proper French grammar, the classic field trip to Versailles, the teaching of Victor Hugo, Foucault and the film staunchly advocate the promotion of traditional French culture. Foucault has no interest in examining or advancing the immigrants’ own cultural background, nor the current pop scene (staff pot party apart). His and the film’s assumption is that today has to respect yesterday. Immigrants to France have to become French, have to adopt their host culture, and not try to import and advance their own instead. 

The other side is represented by the violent gang Seydou briefly joins. They disdain the community of old France and seek to impose their own will and their own forms of liberty, fraternity and inequality. 
      In this insistence upon preserving their own national culture France presents a strong model for contemporary Europe as its massive immigration challenges their cultural norms. In the rest of Europe the old culture may be buckling to the insistent new. Even France harbours resistant pockets, sealed communities of Seydou's gang. This point is what makes this film especially pertinent today. For this Foucault unapologetically defends French tradition in art, values, civilization and grammar, even as -- in the film's last joke -- he seems to be apologizing.

A Previous Engagement (2008)

This 2008 romantic comedy slipped under the radar without being recognized as a delightful revival of the classic screwball comedy. 

Julia and Alex fell passionately in love in Malta 25 years ago. Then they separated, she planning to become the next James Joyce, he the next Che Guevera. 

They pledged to meet there again in 25 years to resume their ardor. 

And so they do. But Julia arrives lumbered with her dull (insurance claims) husband Jack, further burdened by older daughter Jenny, heartbroken but with new swain Tyler in tow, and then Jill, jealous of being left out. Alex comes with his pretty and embarrassingly available assistant. 

But the old passion has survived. Alex remembers Julia’s mole. They both treasure the beach where they first made love, the best sex either ever had. 

Their old attraction reheats them at first sight, touch, and especially their first embrace whether on or under the (rented) marital bed. As fervid as their love is their anger at any perceived betrayal. 

  Accidents and embarrassments abound, for in screwball comedy -- as in other forms of reality -- the course of true love never does run smooth. That’s what makes this a screwball comedy: the forces of domestic order and conventional decorum are exploded by the irresistible, disturbing energy of love and its madcap spirit.

Also, the dialogue is as nervous and edgy as the action. Fast talk is key to the genre. “I’m a lot sluttier than I look,” fresh divorcee Grace promises the newly available Jack. And for Julia’s obligatory Canadian content: “In Canada they rut like rabbits to keep warm.”  Still, the chastened, briefly restored family will henceforth eschew dangerous Europe for holidays with Julia’s sister in Grimsby. 

Neither lover has realized their dreams. Alex came closer, now editing a literary journal in Montreal, four wives later. Julia is married to a man she doesn’t love, who brings massive jigsaw puzzles to excite him in Malta. Their two daughters are still so selfish they refuse to admit “they’re old enough to know the truth about their parents.”

The film is written and directed by a woman, the accomplished Joan Carr-Wiggin. So the snarl of romantic dreams and domestic bathos takes the woman’s perspective. 

Here it’s the heroine who gets to yell “Fuck!” — at the mirror that reflects her aging and lovelessness, at the dutiful, i.e., unhelpful, hotel clerk, at the Malta hills impervious to her disappointment and despair — and finally, exultantly, when her true love has the courage and confidence to believe she will return to him after all. 

So, too, Grace asserts the woman’s right to have her one-night stand — Jack — satisfy her sexual needs — albeit after his. 

Here the housewife moves past her decision to resume her maternal duty. She leaves her selfish, boring family to live her own life. She passes up the Penguin Ulysses in favour of a blank notebook where she can finally start her own writing. Her lover’s return only adds to her fulfilment.

No-one in her family knows Julia’s true nature and depth. “If people knew who their mothers really were the world would end.” Domestic order, marriages, world peace, all depend upon women suppressing their needs and true feelings. 

  But her dull husband Jack has his own surprising resources too, as Grace discovers in and for him. Julia’s last words to her family are “Keep dancing” — which encourages Jack to make his new life with Grace. Julia’s advice, which taps Jack’s long suppressed physical impulses, runs deeper than the tailor’s reform: “There’s no problem I can’t fix with a really good suit.” The new suit doesn't make the dancer but unleashes him. 
     The soundtrack is especially keyed to the developing emotional situation. For the initially disappointed lovers there’s Phil Ochs’s “There are no more songs.” Alex follows the despondent Jack to the Dixieland “You Dirty Rascal You,” after a paradoxically dispirited, slow “Born To Be Wild.” The lovers’ ultimate resolve is to “give all I can give, cross my heart and I hope to live.” In the screwball ethos, anything else, like self-denial, decorum or exhausted resignation, is to die. 

C'est la vie

This hilarious French comedy was originally titled Le sens de la fete. For some reason, that was translated for the international market to C’est la vie. Who knows why. Perhaps to impose a more reassuring, because familiar, attitude.

For this is life, where the best planned parties run disastrous. A lavish wedding in a 17th Century mansion goes manically awry. The anatomy of a crumbling posh wedding evokes Altman’s The Wedding, of course, but the new film is not as biting. 

This aims for humour rather than satire. It soft-pedals any political themes.  The waiters’ spokesman fails to serve his comrades, when they’re required to wear heavy period costumes and wigs. The union leadership fails. The workers give in but without anger. Indeed, despite the event director’s furious tirade against his staff, the “magic” of the event takes hold and he abandons his plan to sell out and retire. 

Though the groom is an upper class twit, the film ignores class prejudice. The servants slip easily into the guests’ activities when it appears necessary for them to hide from a supposed labour inspector. The groom’s mother has a fling with the photographer with whom she has been squabbling. 

So, too, the romance that erupts between the seedy substitute singer and the director’s angry assistant. Their relationship moves from antagonism to love, with dramatic effect. It's enough to make the groom lose his grounding.

Through the evening even the event director loses then wins back the assistant he has been having an affair with. Happily, his wife calls to suggest they separate because she has her own new lover. It's a wedding, so there's romance -- and the groom -- in the air. The event, through all its chaos and frantic adapting, manages to achieve love on several fronts, to change discord into harmony. 

The ex-teacher waiter who still adores the bride is a familiar French type, the grammatical pedant correcting everyone. For all his punctilious language, though, he slops around in what look like pyjamas (“They’re hybrid”) and encourages the director, his brother-in-law, to leave his marriage. 

France’s immigrant class is acknowledged in the Sri Lankan dishwashers, who periodically joke about their new society but are happy to integrate. Passing references to their having their own band and a confusion between two kinds of flute set up the late-night jam between the booked band and the dishwashers’ that closes the night and the film on a note of high harmony. 
     This is a feel-good film. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Dark River

A Yorkshire farm family lives out a curse as harsh and ineluctable as a Greek tragedy.

The life here is elemental. There are threats of fire and purges in rain. The living quarters are primitive, dark, basic. The men are rough-hewn and violent. The sex is brief, impersonal and urgent. The only modern device is the buzzing shearer. When the guard dog breaks its tether it straightaway mauls a sheep, what it was supposed to protect.  

This is no Wonderland that this Alice ploughs through, stolid and capable. We see her shear and dip sheep efficiently as a man. For dinner she skins and guts a rabbit, but is drawn from its domestic cooking by her brother Joe’s drunken aberrancy. She has to fight off his attempt to burn her Range Rover. As Alice, Ruth Wilson is most expressive in her harrowing silences. 

The primeval sin is the father’s habitual violation of the young Alice. He is all the more sinister for his gentle, tender mien. He didn’t need Joe’s violence. 

In shame and anger,  Alice spent 15 years working sheep farms wherever she could find them, before her father’s death enabled her return. As Joe notes, she is still frightened anew every time she enters a room. Her father haunts her still.

And yet…. She has to return to the land. She draws on her father’s promise to leave it to her, however poisoned it is by her experience. She applies for its tenancy. She fights Joe in an attempt to bring her new savvy to the operation. Ultimately she loses when he wins the tenancy on the promise to sell out to a developer. 

The Joe we see is a drunken incompetent lout with his father’s male authority. He is violent but has no sand. For he is as scarred by his father’s sin as Alice is. He doesn’t realize that until she spells it out: “Why didn’t you stop him?” His rage and self-destruction are based in that guilt. 

Joe gets his redemption at the end. He assumes the guilt for the murder Alice accidentally committed. Finally he protects her. 

  Both are strengthened by this cleansing, the confrontation of their curse. So the film closes on an idyllic shot of the two siblings, as teenagers, walking out of the shadowed barn down into their realm of shining fields. It’s probably not a memory but a metaphor for the relationship they have now snatched away from their father’s shadow.
     The title has no literal representation in the film. It’s antithetic to the waterfall in which Alice twice goes to cleanse herself. Another generation of teens repair there too, possibly without her curse to ablute. The dark river is the family’s secret guilt that has rushed through their lives ever since. The regional folk song plays against the tragedy the way the waterfall does against the dark river.
 

The Swan

The opening shot establishes the film’s primary value: the powerful force of nature. But the film shifts from the untrammelled ocean tide to the more stable, sweeping fertility of the land. That’s what provides the humans with sustenance and grounding. 

The central family’s three generations have different relationships with nature. Consequently, they differ in their self-knowledge and integrity. The oldest, Karl and Olof, live modestly but comfortably off their land and cattle. Their marriage is also easy, tender, solid. They have been taking in wayward kids — like Olof’s niece’s nine-year-old daughter Sol here — in hopes that they will find meaning and maturity in the rhythms of farm work.  

They’ve had better luck with these charges than with their own daughter. Asta has lost their harmony with the land. She’s gone to university, lost her husband, has slept around, and comes home pregnant and having blown her final exams.  She ridicules her parents’ small scale of dairy farming, asserting they will be doomed if they don’t go to larger-scale robotic milking. Of course, automated milking loses the immediacy of the hands-on relationship with nature.  Even the city has failed to steady her restless spirit. She has no patience for Sol. Even Asta’s ardour for the black stallion is intermittent and selfish.   

The itinerant hand Jon is more comfortable with nature but shares Asta’s hunger for something more. She ridicules his dedication to writing and capriciously takes him as an occasional lover. She ultimately drops him, possibly to his death. 

Jon romanticizes Asta and thinks he could free and satisfy her passionate nature if only she would let herself go.  But that is a writer’s fantasy, not an effective response to her mercurial wildness. With no grounding or self-acceptance, Asta takes her husband back for a fervid, disappointing one-night stand.

Jon’s scenes with Sol show him sensitive, caring, understanding. When she comes upon him masturbating in the meadow we see his loneliness, his comfort in nature, but the very weakness and indulgence that will drive him into his drunken stupor at the fair. 

These adult worlds are a mystery to young Sol, whose perspective governs the narrative. At her oceanside home she had stolen and lied. In the fields she encounters the serious cycle of life. She witnesses and is bloodied by the birth of a calf. She is heartbroken at its inevitable slaughter and eating. She witnesses the puzzling to-and-fro of Jon’s relationship with Asta, who constantly denies Sol the connection she craves. 

Asta’s fullest conversation is her frightening story of a monster at the lake who will try to seduce Sol into death. In the climactic scene at that lake, the monster Sol experiences is the magnificent swan that swoops down from the heaven, regally sails toward her in the water, then soars back away. In addition to its beauty and grace, the swan represents a natural integrity lost to the generation that has detached itself from nature. In that model Sol may find the lesson she needs to live a natural, integrated life.

We might be tempted to read the swan in either the Leda or Ugly Duckling contexts, but this film seems rather to luxuriate in the Icelandic mythic force of the land.
     Much of the film’s power and effectiveness derives from Gríma Valsdóttir’s performance as Sol. Her child’s face seems to grow ageless as her experiences deepen her emotional range and expose the aspirations and failings of the generation she is about to grow into. She seems to have the potential to embrace the passion of that wild tide, yet rooted in the soil.