Two shoeshiners, one French (André Wilms), the other a Vietnamese pretending to be Chinese (Quoc Dung Nguyen), stand together, scanning the passage of feet along the station floor, seeking to ply their trade. A man, his mouth like a hatchet wound, his hand cuffed to a suitcase, presents his right loafer for service, but soon he’s spotted by some other, equally suspicious-looking men. He runs, they chase, there’s gunfire. Another one bites the dust. The shoeshiners don’t even sigh. Clearly, it’s a dangerous world, one fraught with real, nasty, morally repugnant crimes... as well as crimes of a far more ambiguous nature.
Marcel Marx, the French shoeshiner, has been around; he once was a bohemian in Paris, or so he says, but now ekes out a humble but contented existence and comes home every night to a devoted wife and a very cute dog. Soon the wife will be hospitalized with cancer and in her place will appear an African boy named Idrissa (Blondin Miguel), whose clandestine journey by shipping container to the UK got interrupted and is now on the run in this forgotten French port city. Marcel can do nothing about his beloved’s illness but at least he can try to help the boy from harm’s way and secure his safe passage to London, where his mom works illegally in a Chinese laundry (but at least she works). Steering clear of the authorities, the enigmatic and ever-present Inspector Monet (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) especially, and shelling out for human smuggling costs won’t be easy, but our aging hero is determined and, just as importantly, unafraid to ask for help. “I’m not alone,” says Marcel. “I have friends.”
In his return to France (he made La Vie de Bohème there in 1992), Finnish wrier/director Aki Kaurismäki didn’t come alone either; he brought along Kati Outinen, star of eight previous Kaurismäkis and thus a sort of talisman, to play Marcel’s dear Arletty (named after the star of France’s beloved Les enfants du paradis), and bring a boldness and assurance to the film’s more problematic role. (Arletty’s wifely devotion, her refusal to even admit that she’s dying so that she can keep ironing Marcel’s clothes, cooking Marcel’s meals and managing Marcel’s paltry finances for as long as possible, can be a little hard to take; Le Havre’s Marxist cred is pretty impeccable, its feminist cred not so much.)
Both a love letter to French cinema and a letter bomb addressed to France’s xenophobic immigration policy makers, Le Havre, named for the Normandy city in which it’s set (which also happens to be the penultimate stop made by the sailors in Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante), brings Kaurismäki’s ongoing exploration of working class solidarity back to foreign shores, resulting in one of his finest, most affectionate, and probably most crowd-pleasing films. To be sure, Le Havre feels like a summation rather than any sort of renovation of Kaurismäki’s 30-year career, examining familiar themes and tropes—yep, there’s a rock and roll show, this one featuring the vocal stylings of Little Bob—and firmly grounding itself in that distinctive deadpan-melodrama, Bresson-does-Buster Keaton approach that filmgoers will recognize as Kaurismäki’s trademark. Yet for all that, the film feels very much alive, engaged and enraged, full of ragged but persistent hope, less resting on laurels than shaking them back to life. And in the truly remarkable scenes that find Kaurismäki's camera calmly fixing itself upon the faces of the (often real-life) undocumented foreigners, imposing nothing, we sense that no matter how persistently mannered this filmmaker's approach may be, he remains alert to the world, and allows his subjects their dignity, their chance to simply be present for his camera and for all of us around the world watching their faces, and hopefully wondering about their fate.
Islands, Stefano Chiantini’s third feature, stars Asia Argento as Martina, a woman living on a small, ruggedly beautiful Italian island, a woman so traumatized by loss that she’s resolved to stop speaking and devote herself to caring for bees and an old priest who’s suffered a stroke. Martina is most often clad in baggy pants and boots, a shapeless old ski jacket, and a plaid shirt. Quite a different ensemble than the foxy little dress and six-inch black heels Argento wore to the premiere screening of Islands at the Toronto International Film Festival last night. Islands tracks the convergence of Martina, the priest, and an undocumented foreign labourer who winds up getting stranded on the island and helping take care of the old man, as well as fend off the old man’s sister, who seems fiercely protective of his welfare mainly so she and her husband can get in on the inheritance. Anyway, the three central characters form an archipelago of sorts, and of course Martina and the foreigner, each damaged in their way, gradually move toward romance while facing nominal resistance. Islands has some captivating images of stark landscape and stark interiors, but the illegal immigrant angle is basically incidental and the love story exceedingly familiar. In all seriousness, you almost have to admire how utterly lacking in subtext this film is (especially considering the central character is mute): the sister’s husband actually comes out and states their ulterior motive; Martina fondles photos of some child clearly absent and achingly missed; Martina pulls her nightshirt tight to her breasts before bed, the foreigner having re-awakened her sexual longings; the foreigner sucks honey from Martina’s fingers; and, big-big-big foreshadowing with this one, the foreigner echoes that bit in L’atalante about dunking your head in water to see the ones you love (might Martina have lost someone to the sea?). Yes, Islands is a triumph of exacting story editing. Anyway, it was a perfectly tasteful way to pass a couple of hours on a Wednesday night at TIFF, the point by which everyone is totally fucking exhausted. During the Q&A after the screening someone asked Argento about playing a mute (“It was a relief. Most of the time you have to learn all that dreadful dialogue. It’s so long.”) and about why Martina doesn’t speak. “I tend to remember the great silences in my life,” she replied. “I find that silence is very sexy.” As people shuffled out of the theatre I tried going up to Argento and not saying a single word. Didn’t seem to work.
I keep thinking of that most cherished scene from L’Atalante (1934)—one of the most beautiful movies ever made—the one that forms a bridge between the middle and last parts. The young lovers have separated; the man is miserable. He recalls something the woman told him just after they were wed, that in her village they say that if you dunk your head underwater you will see the face of your beloved. So the man climbs up on the deck of the barge of which he’s skipper and plunges headlong into the wintry-cold canal. And there, below the water’s surface, the villagers’ promise manifests in visions of the woman, all in white, dancing, smiling, a luminous pearl in the liquescent gloom. And it strikes me that this scene invokes the promise of the movies: we submerge ourselves in the dark, hoping to find something like consolation, or excitement, or enlightenment, in the apparitions hovering before us.
A romantic analogy, obviously, but such notions creep up on you when you immerse yourself in the work of Jean Vigo, who died at 29 after having only completed four films, who received scant love while alive but whose posthumous acclaim has found him heralded as the French cinema’s patron saint, a genuine martyr, having literally been killed by filmmaking, his fragile health unable to withstand the bone-chilling location work necessary to complete his masterpiece. I first saw L’Atalante on my birthday, at the Anthology Film Archives, during my first visit to New York. It put me in some kind of a trace. I seemed to be walking on sea legs afterwards, and much of what had just passed before my eyes lingered only as a spectral blur. Thankfully, Criterion has now released The Complete Jean Vigo, and I’m now able to think a little more lucidly about L’Atalante’s singular lyricism, and its echoes in everything else Vigo managed to make during his too-short career.
One of the first examples of what would later be called the essay film, Vigo and co-director Boris Kaufman’s 23-minute À propos de Nice (1930)—the city where Vigo had spent time recovering from tuberculosis, and where he met his wife—is restlessly inventive and irreverent, as much under the spell of Un chien andalou (1929) as it was the fashion for “city films.” It features sail boats, wandering crowds and people lazing in the sun (their clothing changing or suddenly, delightfully, vanishing), car races and can-can dancers (Vigo himself among them), edited in a manner that’s both elegant and mischievous, enthralled by Nice and critical of Nice. It also features gorgeous arial photography, foreshadowing the distinctive gaze from above that would return in each subsequent Vigo.
‘Taris’ (1931), a commissioned, nine-minute documentary on swimming champion Jean Taris, is surprisingly charming and extraordinarily sensual, with images of Taris’ torso twisting below the water’s surface. A final sequence finds him diving in reverse before suddenly appearing in a suit and walking (via superimposition) back into the waves.
A major influence on numerous celebrated films, among them The 400 Blows (1959), Zéro de conduite (1933) is a 44-minute narrative film about the increasingly exhilarating bouts of trouble that a group of boys get into at a provincial boarding school. This ode to childhood disobedience—laying the groundwork for the adult anarchism Vigo ascribed to—makes a cine-poetry of spasms of rebellion, building to an unforgettable climax in which the students declare war on their masters, arming themselves with pillows and converting their dormitory into a battleground strewn with feathers.
Finally, L’Atalante, sadly, Vigo’s sole feature-length work, tells the story of a woman who weds the skipper of a barge. She’s never been outside her village, and though marriage promises to show her the world, she soon realizes that it will mostly be seen only in passing. For the man, this marriage seems to represent a compromise between domesticity and freedom. Vigo conveys their troubled yet passionate romance through a delicate mise-en-scène, flowing with languorous lateral movement, haunting images of water and fog, displays of bizarre objects gathered from around the world, scenes of remarkable, touching intimacy of the sort still rare in movies, and abundant earthy humour in the form of Le père Jules (the great Michel Simon, of Renoir's Boudu Saved From Drowning), the bumbling old sea dog who often steals the show with his rants, accordion playing, and one-man wrestling matches.
