Le Havre | Film review

“You’ve been crying?” the old man asks his adolescent charge, who shakes his head no. “Good,” the man replies. “It won’t help.” That kind of offhand tough love characterizes Le Havre, a sentimental story told unsentimentally. Named for the French port city in which it’s set, the film concerns an aging shoe shiner (André Wilms) who hides an illegal, underage African immigrant (Blondin Miguel) from the police officers who want to send him packing. Factor in a sick wife, a loyal pooch and a persistent investigator, and the whole thing sounds like a recipe for tearjerking pap. That it never plays that way is a testament to the restraint of Finnish writer-director Aki Kaurismäki. The man’s as allergic to schmaltz as he is to switching up his clean, functional, wholly unremarkable shooting style.

Le Havre doesn’t push your emotional buttons—but then, it doesn’t push much of anything. Like most of Kaurismäki’s films, it’s a low-key charmer that seems to evaporate as you watch it. What a relief that the relationship between Wilms and Miguel never devolves into a surrogate father-son dynamic, though Kaurismäki might have afforded the younger actor a few more notes to play. (The kid is polite, grateful, resilient—less a character than a plot device.) Of the film’s various supporting townsfolk, the most interesting is actually the mean old police investigator (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), who proves to be more complicated than he initially appears. There might have been a better film made from his plight and sacrifice.