{"id":6717,"date":"2018-06-21T16:15:49","date_gmt":"2018-06-21T20:15:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=6717"},"modified":"2018-06-21T16:15:49","modified_gmt":"2018-06-21T20:15:49","slug":"the-other-side-of-hope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2018\/06\/21\/the-other-side-of-hope\/","title":{"rendered":"The Other Side of Hope."},"content":{"rendered":"

Note: I\u2019m on vacation at the moment and thus not checking email or social media. I\u2019m still writing a little, though, because I feel better when I do.<\/em><\/p>\n

I only have a few 2017 movies I missed and still want to catch, including Israel\u2019s Oscar submission Foxtrot<\/em> (which made the shortlist but not the final five), but since I\u2019m traveling abroad at the moment a few films that haven\u2019t been released digitally in the US are suddenly available to me. One of those is 2017\u2019s The Other Side of Hope<\/em>, a really weird-ass Finnish film with a stark message about humanism and the European migrant crisis along with some of the strangest cinematography and editing I\u2019ve ever seen. And that\u2019s before we even talk about the sushi scene.<\/p>\n

The film is barely 95 minutes outside of the credits, and the two main characters Waldemar Wikstr\u00f6m and Khaled Ali don\u2019t even meet until about an hour into the story. Wikstr\u00f6m is an unhappy, apparently affect-less shirt salesman who sells his entire stock, takes his winnings to an illegal poker room to grow them exponentially, and then invests the bulk of it in a failing restaurant with the most incompetent staff you could possibly imagine. Khaled is a Syrian refugee who first appears in a pile of soot or dirt, applies for asylum, and enters the Finnish refugee system, which is depicted here as arbitrary and capricious. It is only when Khaled\u2019s application is denied that fate throws him into Wikstr\u00f6m\u2019s path and the dour restaurateur decides to help the Syrian try to stay in the country illegally and eventually be reunited with his missing sister.<\/p>\n

The story itself is straightforward if a bit unrealistic at several points – especially anything around the restaurant, which can\u2019t possibly exist with the three stooges running it, including the laziest cook on the planet, the dumbest doorman on the planet, and a waitress who might be the most competent of the three simply because she doesn\u2019t do anything. It\u2019s the way the film is shot that is so jarring; if I didn\u2019t know this was the work of Finnish director Aki Kaurism\u00e4ki, I would wonder if this was the work of a precocious film student. Kaurism\u00e4ki, who also directed 2011\u2019s Le Havre<\/a><\/em> has said this will be his last film, has a quirky, minimalist visual style that isn\u2019t much more expansive with dialogue, much of it delivered drily to the point of atonality. That makes the Wikstr\u00f6m plot line kind of hard to appreciate until Khaled shows up, since the refugee story unfurls with more emotion, mostly from Khaled telling his own history since he before he left Aleppo and from the friendship he forges with fellow asylum seeker Mazdak. There are weird, lingering shots of still faces and background items. People line up to talk to each other as if in a marching band, and often speak to each other at an obtuse angle that looks completely unnatural, using a flat tone and rarely expressing any emotion – no one cries in the film, and no one laughs.<\/p>\n

Once the two plots unite, however, the movie takes a sudden turn towards deadpan humor, some of it extremely funny – including the aforementioned sushi scene, as Wikstr\u00f6m attempts to turn the failing eatery into a Japanese restaurant, with preposterous results – even as Khaled\u2019s safety is in danger both from Finnish authorities and from a group of neo-Nazis who attack him more than once on the street. The Finnish people generally come off as kind and open in the movie, despite the few outright racists running around, while the government itself comes off as heartless and ineffectual. The encounter with Khaled seems to light a spark of humanity in Wikstr\u00f6m, and maybe even in one of the other employees (not the cook, who appears unable to boil water), but any hope there might be in the film comes from individuals, not form the institutions that, in theory, exist to help such people who have found no help from anyone else.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Note: I\u2019m on vacation at the moment and thus not checking email or social media. I\u2019m still writing a little, though, because I feel better when I do. I only have a few 2017 movies I missed and still want to catch, including Israel\u2019s Oscar submission Foxtrot (which made the shortlist but not the final […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[925,1018,556,215,1019],"class_list":["post-6717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2017-movies","tag-finnish-films","tag-immigrant-fiction","tag-movies","tag-social-commentary","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6717"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6717\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6718,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6717\/revisions\/6718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}