The Other Side of Hope

The Other Side of Hope, the second part of Aki Kaurismaki's planned migrant trilogy, bears a superficial similarity to its predecessor, Le Havre, but six years and millions more people displaced make the two films feel like dispatches from different worlds. True, both are tales of immigrants stranded on the shores of a European port, with the French setting and African boy of the first film traded for Finland and a young Syrian refugee named Khaled. Of course, the cast is stacked with Kaurismaki's usual coterie of stone-faced Finns and aging rockabilly musicians, and the plot is shaggier than a sheepdog: a financially struggling shirt salesman, Waldemar Wikstrom, leaves his alcoholic wife and gambles his life savings in an illicit high-stakes poker game in order to purchase a restaurant staffed by the comic-relief squad. But the refugee crisis has only grown in severity since 2011, and The Other Side of Hope strikes a consistently darker tone than Le Havre as a result. The soft-hearted police inspector of the earlier film has been replaced by an indifferent bureaucratic machine; kindness remains the chief currency of Kaurismaki's world, but it seems to buy so much less now. Television news footage of the destruction in Syria appears at one point, and the grainy, violent imagery set against the filmmaker's gentle, quiet style feels like a deliberate act of vandalism. 

Kaurismaki still mines humour from Europe's cultural myopia, particularly in the sequence where the restaurant crew fumbles an attempt to serve sushi, but his depiction of the racist thugs as dimwits—one nonsensically spits anti-Semitic epithets at Khaled after attacking him—never forgets the very real danger represented by nativist violence. Friends and strangers alike step forward with their own acts of kindness, but helping one man escape the police or chasing away a racist gang can do little against a stacked immigration system and the escalating global wave of refugees. Kaurismaki seems to genuinely be grappling with how individual action, however noble and humane, can do anything for a problem of such massive scale, and the film's ambivalent ending contains a world of suffering in a single sad smile. Khaled's sister submits herself to the same system that has already failed her brother, who heads off to an uncertain fate, still a citizen of nowhere. Briefly reunited, the pair seemed destined to separate lives once again, while Wikstrom chances upon his wife, now sober and healthy, working in a bodega and ready to resume married life. Apparently happy endings are still possible—for the locals, anyways.