The Other Side Of Hope (12A)

TO describe a film as a comedy that deals with the Syrian refugee crisis might denote bad taste. Yet Aki Kaurismäki’s idea of humour, famously deadpan, is perfectly suited to a subject so unspeakably unjust that it barely seems real.

In fact, The Other Side Of Hope is a skilled combination of comedy with drama, contemporary news events from the Middle East with the writer/director’s customarily glum presentation of his fellow Finns. It’s an incredibly apt film, made in the most unconventional way.

Kaurismäki is a director of conscience. His previous, Le Havre in 2011, concerned a French shoe-shine man who tries to help a child refugee from Africa. This time he’s on home soil, Helsinki, but the theme is much the same: those who have little to shout home about, showing solidarity towards someone who has nothing.

It opens at the Helsinki port, with a man emerging from a coal container, his face blackened. What’s striking about Khaled (Sherwan Haji) is not how dirty he is, but how remarkably composed he is beneath. Leaving the ship, he hands money to a beggar, cleans himself in a public shower and presents himself to the police, seeking asylum.

The story Khaled tells immigration officials is terrible and familiar. A mechanic from Aleppo, he came home one day to find his family and fiancé dead in the rubble. He and his sister fled Syria for a torturous path across the Balkans, where he lost her.

In tandem with Khaled’s story is that of Wikström (Sakari Kuosmanen), a middle-aged shirt salesmen who we first meet leaving his alcoholic wife. They look at each other without speaking, he drops his wedding ring into her ashtray, she stubs her cigarette into it.

Wikström also decides to change jobs. Selling his stock of shirts, he takes the money to a high-stakes poker game (any Kaurismäki protagonist naturally has a poker face) where he wins enough to buy a dreary restaurant, inheriting three dubiously skilled staff and a stray dog.

As Wikström struggles to make the restaurant a success (there is a brilliantly botched attempt to segue from sardines to sushi), Khaled moves into a reception centre, where he befriends an Iraqi refugee who’s been waiting for news on his application for a year and advises Khaled to smile. “All melancholics they send back,” he asserts, which is a trifle ironic given that the locals seems to have melancholy flowing in their veins.

Khaled is then attacked by neo-Nazis, before discovering for himself what you might call a lack of logic, as well as humanity in the asylum process. And the two storylines come together.

One of the challenges of Kaurismäki’s films is in trying to gauge the life behind the façade of stiff, chain-smoking characters whose droll demeanour gives so little away. In this film, the humanity exists in the immediacy and ease with which Wikström and his staff take in the runaway refugee. There is no discussion, merely action.

In a brilliant scene, everyone’s fate is at stake as restaurant inspectors come to check the premises, and the illegal immigrant and the stray dog hide together in the ladies loo. The presence of the Syrian, whose personality Haji calibrates to be just a few degrees warmer than his co-stars, seems to thaw his Finnish benefactor. Rather than culture clash, there’s mutual benefit. It’s genuinely, if oddly heartwarming. If only those pesky racists would just throw themselves into the Baltic.

As usual, the director livens up his action with music, a rockabilly band appearing at various locations in the film.

Also released ...

Pirates Of The Caribbean: Salazar’s Revenge (12A)

Not much changes in the fifth instalment of the fairground ride-inspired pirate franchise. Once again a dead pirate is out to avenge himself on Captain Jack Sparrow; a mystical treasure might save Sparrow from a watery grave; two young lovers tag along. Though shameless, the film has its moments – jolly sea-dog jaunts and imaginative action sequences. But Johnny Depp’s Sparrow, once the main attraction, is now no more than a drunken caricature.

The Red Turtle (PG)

Gorgeous animated tale, by a Dutch-British animator but very much in the Studio Ghibli style. A man is washed up on a desert island. Every time he tries to depart on a bamboo raft, an unseen creature destroys it. When he discovers this is a giant red turtle, the man seeks revenge – but with extremely surprising, and deeply moving, consequences.

Baywatch (15)

Dwayne Johnson and Zack Efron star in a very silly but likeable big-screen spoof of the long-running TV series, about buff Californian lifeguards.