The Other Side of Hope: No-Home Movie

If there is one central theme that dominates the Kaurismäki oeuvre, it is the lives of people at the margins of society. Present from his 1983 narrative debut, an adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, it finds full expression a few years later in his “Proletariat Trilogy”: Shadows in Paradise, Ariel, and The Match Factory Girl (1990). The focus in these films is usually on an individual outsider, though it occasionally expands to include a romantic partner. But with La vie de bohème (1992), which adapts the nineteenth-century episodic novel by Henri Murger that was also the basis of Giacomo Puccini’s famous opera La bohème, we begin to see a concern for friendship and camaraderie—in this case, among a group of down-at-the-heels artists in Paris. This concern blossoms into a full paean to communal solidarity in Drifting Clouds (1996), one of the director’s masterpieces, and a key precursor to The Other Side of Hope. Kaurismäki is one of fictional cinema’s most respectful chroniclers of labor—from factory work to garbage collection to live musical performance—and both films capture, in revealing, often comic detail, the day-to-day operation of a restaurant as a collective endeavor. Also in both films, the protagonists are memorably accompanied in their labors as well as their lives by dogs.

Dogs cut a fascinating trajectory across Kaurismäki’s filmography. In the early period of the eighties, they appear as vehicles of symbolic import, such as the Tarkovskian dog that dashes across an urban wasteland at the moment of a trash collector’s death in Shadows in Paradise, or the German shepherds that are released during a prison break (and stand in for the power of the state) in Ariel. In the middle period of the nineties, they graduate to membership in the family unit: La vie de bohème gives the pooch Baudelaire the romantic happy ending it denies its human protagonists, for example, and a dog serves as a couple’s substitute for their deceased child in Drifting Clouds. Finally, in the late period, which kicks off at the turn of the twenty-first century, dogs become established as companion figures identified with displaced people of color, as in Le Havre or The Other Side of Hope.

There is a genuineness to the presence of dogs in Kaurismäki’s cinema that owes something to his personal roots in the ethos of punk culture, which has long guided the looseness of his shooting methods. Barring technical gaffes, he rarely does more than one or two takes of each scene, which means that he spends little effort training the dogs that appear in his films. In fact, rather than going to the trouble of hiring “performer” animals, he simply features his own pets in his movies.

For all its unforced charm, though, Kaurismäki’s work also draws a special strength from its deft framing of a play of opposites. He is, on the one hand, a committed humanist whose attitude toward his characters is one of love and generosity. His films trace an ongoing commitment to figures of otherness—introverted loners, nonconformist bohemians, the unemployed. In the latter part of his career, these characters are often damaged or cut adrift by society. As a solace, the films bestow them with the friendship of kindly humans and canines. But the threat of nihilism is never far away. It is de rigueur for a Kaurismäki film to feature a scene in which the protagonist is severely beaten by white male thugs—usually for no reason at all. In The Other Side of Hope, however, it turns out there is a (vile) reason: Khaled is savagely attacked, twice, by white supremacists whose black leather jackets are emblazoned with the words “Liberation Army Finland.” While this organization is fictional, it stands in for an assortment of real-life far-right, anti-immigrant groups—such as Finland’s Soldiers of Odin or Greece’s Golden Dawn—whose alarming rise in Europe has been concurrent with the worldwide refugee crisis.