Le Havre expresses its social consciousness a bit more emotively than The Man Without a Past, another, somewhat similar effort from Finnish writer-director Aki Kaurismaki. Keep in mind, of course, that being “emotive” for Kaurismaki’s characters means blinking during one of the many, extended portrait shots in which they stare off-screen or directly into the camera. Doing much of the staring here is Marcel (André Wilms), a shoeshine man working the streets of the French maritime town of the title. His modest life gets a tumultuous jolt from two events: the sudden hospitalization of his wife (Kati Outinen) and his encounter with a refugee boy from Africa (Blondin Miguel) who is hiding from immigration officials. A lot of heartwarming wish fulfillment ensues, so that Le Havre plays less like a snapshot of Europe wrestling with the realities of a migrant crisis and more like a fantasy about how Kaurismaki wishes every migrant’s story would play out.
