A COUPLE of years ago, a touching Israeli comic-drama dubbed Noodle stole this reviewer’s heart when it showed as part of PIAF’s Lotterywest Festival Films season.
Desperately attempting to return an abandoned cute-as-a-button Chinese boy, nicknamed Noodle, to his mother (a migrant-worker in Israel who had been deported), a twice-widowed flight attendant decides that the only way to cut through the bureaucratic red-tape is to pop the adorable little innocent into her suitcase on board a flight bound for Beijing.
In Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismaki’s French-set and spoken comic-humanist Le Havre – showing at this year’s Lotterywest Festival Films season – a similarly spirited scene sees shoe-shiner, Marcel (Andre Wilms), heroically hide a young African refugee boy at the bottom of a fruit cart, away from prying eyes of police.
It’s an amusingly touching moment that typifies the unhurried, deadpan humorous style of the Fin auteur, whose pre-filmmaking career included a range of odd jobs, from postman to dishwasher (probably explaining his humanist approach).
Le Havre is set in the titular Northern French industrial port city, where down-on-his-luck one-time Parisian bohemian Marcel struggles to earn a crust (not that you will hear him complaining or see him looking despondent) after police force him to vacate his choice shoe-shining locale outside the local train station.
After a chance encounter with young Idrissa (Blondin Miguel) – who is also trying to evade the attention of the authorities after arriving in a big shipping container from Gabon – Marcel helps the boy to reunite with his mother in London, even going to a refugee camp at Dunkirk, near Calais, where he tries to pass as “the family albino”.
A keen film buff and one-time film critic, Kaurismaki playfully integrates various cinematic conventions, genres (Hollywood melodrama, western, fairytale, spy thriller et al) and references to give an intriguing stylistic treatment of the 21st Century-pertinent issue of illegal “boat people” with the vintage mid-20th Century ambience of a classic, grainy old matinee.
LE Havre (PG)
Directed by: Aki Kaurismaki
Starring: Andre Wilms, Blondin Miguel
Screening: Somerville, UWA, from January 16-22, at 8pm, as part of PIAF’s Lotterywest Festival Films
Rating: Three-and-a-half stars
Reviewed by: Emilia Vranjes