The Other Side of Hope (2017)

Am a huge fan of Kaurismaki. Have seen almost all his films. But this one disappoints, especially as it's his first movie in 7 years, since Le Havre (2011). The first half or so plays like mere pro-immigrant propaganda. It isn't until the 2nd half that K seems to wake up and remember his signature, inseparable blend of melancholy and humor, and his flat, off-key sense of the absurd. And even then it's not his best: pro-immigrant sentimentality and self-serious earnestness sneaks in and taints the 2nd half of the movie, as well, violating K's old, ironclad disinterest and neutrality, and ruthless irony. His offbeat timing isn't as impeccable as it was. It seems K has sunk to ideology and waving a placard.

K's eyes, just narrow slits, were bloodshot and his speech incoherent in the DVD extra of his interview at the Berlin Film Festival. Could it be he's succumb to the sloppy excesses of alcoholism?

Fmovies: "The Other Side Of Hope" is a pleasant enough story and, at 110 minutes, doesn't make a pest of itself. It is part drama and (small) part comedy, but the comedy is so subtle as to be negligible. As related in the summary, an immigrant and a businessman find each other and form a friendship/partnership sort of an alliance. I wish I could relate some high points in the narrative, but this movie has neither high nor low emotional highlights.

I am trying to watch indies and foreign films as I am weary of Hollywood's tripe, but this film doesn't give you much to root for. It is too bland, and I'm sorry to say it needed a Hollywood writer to punch it up some.

The Other Side of Hope is a Kaurismaki classic, full of bittersweet sarcasm and existentialism, if by the latter we mean an honest reflection of what is. It also contains some great music, although I sometimes think that it is how he lets music exist in his films that makes it great, rather than the music per se.

By centering his story around a Syrian refugee in Helsinki, the film brings forward the view of the migrant/refugee, and that is very important,because we do not only see the European view of the Other; Kaurismaki enters the Other's reality in modern fortress-Europe. It helps us think what it really means to be a young man/woman stuck in these postmodern concentration camps, waiting for some bureaucratic agency to review your asylum application and define, from some thousand miles away, whether the hell that you fled from can be officially called "war" or whatever. Or what it means to carry this burden and walk in the same streets with the "true Finns" or other nationalistic, xenophobic scums. It also depicts the power of solidarity, albeit in Kaurismaki's typically sarcastic manner.

Anyhow, Kaurismaki always seems to take a certain distance from the things he narrates (some call him a snobbish filmmaker, others may claim that he makes a caricature of his characters), but his magic lies on the fact that it is precisely this distance (plus tons of alcohol, apparently) that makes his films so honest and humane. There is always a certain absurdity in play, yet to me Kaurismaki does realism in the most accurate meaning of the word. You exit the cinema and you see (and hear) this absurd realism applied all over the city. This film is no exception. It may not be his "magnum opus", but his kind of artists doesn't need this bourgeois terminology at all. It is what you make of it.

The Other Side of Hope fmovies. Syrian refuge Khaled arrives by sheer chance in Finland from war- torn Aleppo. We follow him as his application for asylum is processed. He is befriended by an Iraqi refuge at the refuge centre, and his journey in Finland begins here.

The officials are coldly efficient - with flashes of humanity - in a kafkaesque depiction of meaningless application of migration laws.

At the same time, Finnish businessman, Waldemar Wikström, buys a business and the two - very different - worlds of the main characters collide.

The humour is dry, the Finnish 'tango' (ballad-singing) music is wonderful, I absolutely loved it. It is worth seeing the film for this alone.

It is a super 'feel good' film, without the viewer quite being able to put a finger on why this is so.

It is the sheer humanity of it.

Saw this at the Berlinale 2017, where it was part of the official competition for the Golden Bear. The synopsis on the festival website was not really promising, but my prejudice disappeared gradually during the screening. Although the movie has a certain inclination to become a fairy tale where everyone will live happily ever after, the ending has some darker sides to downplay the assumed optimistic story. One of these darker sides lies in the several times appearing "Finland security" men, who are up to no good.

Our first main protagonist Khaled is seeking asylum in Finland. From the outside, it looks like a very clean process as far as shown to us. The idle waiting time related to the asylum application procedure does hide the rough edges we often read about, namely that asylum seekers among themselves are making trouble when seeing others with a different religion or other political position, or even worse when seeing GLBT behavior that they are not prepared to allow. Intolerance can be very problematic here, given that the people are packed together, while at the same time being bored to death, doomed to wait, unable to do anything useful. Due to their numbers and possible variations in asylum seekers, it is a sheer impossible task to sort and separate them in such a way that such troubles are prevented. In this movie, however, the asylum seekers are living harmoniously together, and help each other where they can without seeking favors in return. What does Finland do what we apparently are doing wrong in The Netherlands??

Our second main protagonist Wikström follows a completely different path. On a random morning, he leaves his wedding ring and house keys with his wife, who is clearly alcohol addicted. He sells his stock but keeps the storage space (will become unexpectedly useful later). What also proves useful is his poker face, and he succeeds in multiplying his amount of cash considerably, to the extent that he can buy a restaurant including staff. The capabilities of the restaurant staff that he takes over with the rest of the inventory and furniture, do not look very promising from the outset, but he keeps them nevertheless.

For the first 30 minutes or so, the stories of above two main protagonists run their completely separate course. We see them in turns, both paths clearly delineated, simply by having other people and another decor visible. After his asylum request being denied, and just before being transported to a plane to be sent back, Khaled escapes and starts an uncertain life on the street. He is found sleeping between the trashcans by fresh restaurateur Wikström, from which moment on their lives become mingled.

The restaurant business does not go as well as may be hoped. Given the quality of the staff that he inherited when buying the restaurant, it can be no surprise from the first day on. For example, when someone orders sardines from the menu, that seems to mean that he receives a half opened can. More humor follows later on when they try out different restaurant types, e.g. sushi being prepared out of a cooking book. Other experiments also hardly succeed. A surprise inspection is handled in a way not exactly by-the-book but they pass. These humoristic scenes are intermixed with the more serious main line of the story.

The story includes a series of lucky strikes and happy coincidences that is overwhelming, bordering on statistically impossible. But otherwise there would have been no story to tell, so who am I to complain. The musical fragments we witn

Remember the pretty boy Ronan Keating singing that you say it best when you say nothing at all? Of course you don't, you only listen to good music. But this could be the very motto of Finnish legendary moviemaker Aki Kaurismäki's latest. This minimalist masterpiece is so achingly simple and elegant and yet so complex in a good way, that there's no really good way to describe it, if you don't understand Kaurismäki's style already. „Toivon tuolla puolen" („The Other Side of Hope" in English, „Teispool lootust" in Estonian") is like a haiku: it can convey so much with so little words and even so little action. I can't find fitting comparisions here, but Kaurismäki comes across like Jim Jarmusch's less snobish cousin: even more concentrated on what it's like to be human and small things that life is actually made of. They both value storytelling through details but Kaurismäki's approach is more mainstreamfriendly: you don't have to invest yourself fully all the time to make sense of what's going on exactly. „Toivon tuolla puolen" offers two bittersweet stories interwining, about refugee in strange and hostile land and old entrepreneur who leaves his wife and finds fresh start in running a diner. It often feels like comedy – Kaurismäki's approach could be called Finnish version of Soviet nostalgia that many 30-year or older viewers will respond to and enjoy. Judging by Estonian premiere, it's a real crowdpleaser. But deeper down it's more about bleak and sad side of human existence: loneliness, being unwanted, trying to find purpose when everything has fallen down. And, of course, about how there's no winning with nowadays' refugee crisis – it brings suffering for everyone involved, except for maybe those who like to attack people who „shouldn't be here". I give this quietly hilarious and heartbreaking masterpiece a near- perfect score. Although it doesn't break new grounds for Kaurismäki, I can't think of a way how it could be improved in any meaningful way. The movie's not gonna satisfy everybody, nothing will, but it's almost perfect the way it is. Deceptively simple but powerful experience that you can't imagine getting from anybody else than Kaurismäki.