How can a fictionalised film do justice to the real heart-break dramas going on in the French ports today? The plight of the illegal immigrants doomed to rot in sea containers or arrested by Les Flics has wrenched the conscience of many contemporary directors – think of Phillippe Lloret’s excellent 2009 movie, WELCOME.

The theme is often dealt with in a gritty, melancholy way but not so this new offering from Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki.
LE HAVRE tells its story of a young African boy desperate to join his sister in England but washed up and marooned in France. He is soon on the run from the gun-toting immigration cops. Kaurismäki’s take on this potentially tragic story is to tell it as fairy tale – a long-gone world of France where the downtrodden band together to help their brothers and sisters in a spirit of romantic fraterniy. If only.

Kaurismäki’s take on this potentially tragic story is to tell it as fairy tale…

Kaurismäki artfully recreates an innocent Tati-esque world of lovable café owners, poor but charming drinkers (busily discussing recipes for steamed scallops) and a police inspector out of the annals of Maigret (complete with Trilby and mac). There is a very strange, slightly unsettling feeling of two colliding worlds here: this idealized France whose goodhearted inhabitants seem fixed in the 1940s and a contemporary, brutalized world of riot police and refugee encampments. Kaurismäki’s empathy for the plight of the African boy is somehow enhanced by setting his story in these two conflicting worlds.

Central to the story is Andre Wilms as Marcel Marx, the gnarled, chain-smoking shoeshine Frenchman with a heart of gold. It is he who provides sanctuary for the boy and between endless glasses of wine in the local down-at-heel café, enlists all kinds of unlikely allies to the cause. At the same time, Marcel’s wife Arletty is rushed to hospital with a life-threatening illness. Our laconic hero Marcel must cope without his supportive wife and try to throw off the attention of the eagle-eyed Inspector Monet.

This is a film that just oozes with charm, wit and a very offbeat take on a serious contemporary theme.

This is a film that just oozes with charm, wit and a very offbeat take on a serious contemporary theme. There are moments of genuine poignancy, heartfelt humanity and complete off-the-wall craziness. It is a movie that is hard not to love despite its deliberately fantastical take on a very harsh and un-fairytale world. In creating this idealised world, the point about the plight of the illegal immigrants is somehow made much more powerfully. It is a clever, disarming and fresh take on a society that is far from being fairytale.