THE OTHER SIDE OF HOPE. (2017) DIRECTED BY AKI KAURISMÄKI. STARRING SAKARI KUOSMANEN AND SHERWAN HAJI. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
'With hilarious sight gags, poker-faced one-liners and a toe-tapping rockabilly soundtrack, Kaurismäki's latest balances his unparalleled wit with a pressing critique of the unforgiving bureacracy that greets vulnerable asylum-seekers in modern-day Europe. Humane and sincere, it's proof of cinema's power to tell stories that matter, with beauty and heart.'
This is one of the nicest and best films I've seen all summer. It's actually a comedy, but not the kind that beats you over the head with the funniness of it all. It's much cleverer, wittier and subtler than that. I'd describe it as a quiet, low-key comedy that starts out slowly and gradually builds its way up to greatness.
I'm not dissing the other kind of comedy, mind you, the kind where a guy falls down the stairs and then the contents of the fish-bowl land on his head and he's sitting there wearing a woebogone expression and a goldfish on his bonce while a tuba or an oboe plays a woeful 'waa-waa-waa-waaaaaaaaah...!' kind of note that denotes mournfulness. That kind of thing can be unsurpassed when a Buster Keaton or a Charlie Chaplin does it.
THE OTHER SIDE OF HOPE, however, is a future classic waiting to happen, with plenty of satirical side-swipes in it against the petty bureaucracy of the world we live in today and the sheer f***ing insanity of a system that will send a man back to the country he's just escaped from, the country that may well kill him if he returns to it.
Anyway, here we go. Khaled is the Syrian refugee at the centre of the plot. The winds of fate have blown and tossed him as far as Helsinki in Finland, a good safe distance away from the country where his entire family, save for his sister Miriam, have all perished in a terrible bomb attack. He's desperate for news of his missing sister, and also quite keen never to return to Syria, for obvious reasons.
At least, they're obvious to us, the viewers. Unfortunately, they're not so obvious to the Finnish government, who decide bizarrely to send Khaled back to the very hell-hole from which he's just escaped because they deem the risk to his person to be not so high.
Not so high? It pretty much beggars belief how they've reached this conclusion. I mean, a children's hospital has just been bombed in his home town of Aleppo but what the hey, let's send him back there anyway, he'll be grand...
Not so high? It pretty much beggars belief how they've reached this conclusion. I mean, a children's hospital has just been bombed in his home town of Aleppo but what the hey, let's send him back there anyway, he'll be grand...
It's doubly unfair because Khaled, although he was smuggled into the country as an illegal, did all the right things once he arrived in Finland. He went straight to the cop-shop to present himself as a man seeking asylum in Finland.
He applied for the asylum legally and, while he was waiting for his answer from the Finnish authorities, he lived quietly and respectably in the asylum-seekers' refugee centre, by which I was initially most impressed.
Nice and clean with comfy beds, food and the essentials of hygiene such as toothbrush and shaving kit all provided, free of charge. Khaled even makes a friend there, a man fleeing from that other lovely and serene top holiday resort, Iraq...!
What's the point of all of it, though, if the Finnish government are just going to send Khaled back to Syria like a package that's been mis-directed? It really does beggar belief, as I said earlier.
You can't even appeal the official decision either, apparently. It's obvious that the government doesn't want to take in any more asylum-seekers than it has to. It's more than sad, it's a f***ing tragedy, that's what it is.
Meanwhile, Wikström is a middle-aged man who's left his alcoholic wife and sold his unfulfilling business as a shirt salesman to set up a restaurant close by to the reception centre that poor Khaled's being slung out of.
Wikström is my favourite character, even more than Khaled. He's so deliciously deadpan as he goes about introducing himself to the raggle-taggle of staff whom he's 'inherited' along with the restaurant and then sets about attempting manfully to make a silk purse out of what's very clearly going to be a sow's ear.
When the lives of Khaled and Wikström intersect, the stage is set for not only some brilliantly comic humour but also a sense that there really are some good, decent people left in this crazy, war-torn world of ours and that, if we're lucky, we'll find them. Or they'll find us.
The scene where they try to turn the restaurant into an upmarket sushi bar is hilarious. They miscalulate the wasabi proportions spectacularly, something it's probably better not to do if you're a sushi chef...
A film like this gives you hope for the future. It also shines a light on the refugee situation and puts a human face to it that I, certainly, and maybe others as well, were largely unaware of. I feel embarrassed now to think of my ignorance.
I'm probably not the only person who's switched over the television when news of the Syrian refugee crisis came on because it just doesn't seem relevant to our lives over here in the so-called 'civilised' Western world.
I'll never do that again. Now, refugees have a human face for me and, hopefully, for other viewers too. That much-needed human face is called THE OTHER SIDE OF HOPE and it's a gem of a film. Don't miss it.
Available to buy on DVD & Blu-Ray now from CURZON ARTIFICIAL EYE.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.
Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, film blogger and movie reviewer. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, womens' fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra's books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO
You can contact Sandra at:
http://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com
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