Le Havre (**3/4)

I’d guess half of the French movies I’ve seen take place in Paris, and none in the port city whose very name means port. Technically, it may not be French, as its producer, director, and writer is the Finnish Aki Kaurismäki (The Man Without a Past). The less-familiar setting would seem to suit Kaurismäki’s seemingly stylizing rendering of the place. Although the film provides just enough hints to give the setting away as present day, or close to it, everything about it seems designed to make the place seem frozen in some time where people still use rotary phones (or have none, in the case of the main character), smoke in hospital rooms, and have never heard of a chain restaurant, or any sort of chain. Here a man can still make a modest living shining shoes, then toddle off to the pub while his wife contentedly cooks dinner for him.

It’s all very quaint, and so it would be more accurate to call Kaurismäki’s style of storytelling simple rather than minimalist. Although the story has the aging shoe shiner (André Wilms) shelter a Gabonese boy trying to evade the authorities, this is no more a film about illegal immigration than, say, Taxi Driver, is about teen prostitution. It’s a decent story about decent people being decent. I would like it to have been a little more than that, but the film is never more, though never less, than pleasant. Perhaps the closest it comes is when the shoe shiner, short on cash to help the young man, enlists the aid of a local rocker called Little Bob, who plays himself. True to form, his music sounds up to the minute, if the minute is in 1977.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse 12/8/11 and reviewed 12/8/11

Wonderful World (***)

This is one of those movies in which the main character is so extreme, extremely cynical and down on life, in this case, that the story is obviously going to be about how he’ll change. Ben Singer (Matthew Broderick) is the sad sack in this case, a divorced proofreader who thinks The Man is keeping people down, and feels down about that. He ex worries that his negativity is rubbing off on their tween daughter. He has imaginary, or dreamed, conversations with The Man, ably personified by Philip Baker Hall, who explains that while everyone has bad impulses, not everyone has good ones.

Like Richard Jenkins’s character in The Visitor, Ben lives with a more carefree Senegalese, but it takes a woman—his roommate’s visiting sister (Sanaa Lathan)—to change his worldview. A directorial debut from screenwriter Josh Goldin, Wonderful World doesn’t have many sharp edges, and Ben’s facile ephiphany comes with the unnecessary suggestion that it takes belief in a kind of literal magic to be happy. But it tells a nice tale without pretense. Broderick provides a low-key performance that made Ben seem less obnoxious than he might otherwise sound. He almost made me believe that such a curmudgeon could have truly been, of all things, the former children’s singer (yes, named Singer) he is supposedly to be.

IMDB link

viewed 1/21/10 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 1/24/10

Goodbye Solo (***)

Solo is a Senegalese cabbie in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, who, in the first scene, agrees to take a cranky old white guy on a long, one-way trip to a mountaintop, a few weeks in the future. The two-character drama, not the light plot, is the draw here. Gregarious Solo, a loving stepfather to his Hispanic wife’s daughter, worms his way into the life of the older man, who wavers between resentment, disinterest, and a grudging sort of friendship. It’s clear what the plan is for the end of the trip, and it isn’t a surprise party, but the reasons remain vague, frustrating Solo, and me.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 5/12/09

New Boy (***1/2) [2009 Oscar-nominated shorts program]

An African boy confronts a slur-slinging bully on his first day at his new Irish elementary school. This charming adaptation of a Roddy Doyle story covers comedy, drama, politics, and racism in a mere 11 minutes.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 2/11/09