Aki Kaurismäki at The House

The Other Side of Hope

Aki Kaurismäki makes films about people who don't say very much, but there is always so much happening underneath what they don't say. His characters rarely explain themselves, and his films rarely explain themselves either. Instead, everything is somewhere in the pauses, the glances, the music, the strange little details and the things people quietly do for one another.

For our Film Club, we watched The Other Side of Hope, a film about loneliness, migration, friendship and the strange ways people find each other at strange places.

It is a very Kaurismäki film. The colours are beautiful and strangely saturated, the camera barely moves, the dialogue is minimal and delivered almost completely deadpan. People smoke, drink, listen to old rock'n'roll, sit in small bars and restaurants, and seem to carry entire lives that we are only allowed to glimpse. There is very little excess, and that is part of what makes his films so recognisable.

Kaurismäki has created a cinematic world that feels completely his own. You can often recognise one of his films within a few minutes: the still camera, the carefully composed frame, the strange colours, the old music, the awkward silences and those characters who seem to exist slightly outside the speed of modern life. He doesn't need to tell us exactly what someone is feeling because he trusts us to notice it ourselves. A person sitting alone at a bar, a cigarette between two lines of dialogue, a song playing in the background or someone quietly making room for another person can tell us more than a long monologue ever could.

I think this is one of the reasons his films feel so emotionally generous despite being so restrained. He doesn't tell us how to feel. He leaves enough space for us to feel it ourselves.

His characters are often working-class people, outsiders, drifters, unemployed people, immigrants, lonely people, people who have somehow ended up on the margins of the world. But he never treats them simply as tragic figures or symbols of whatever social issue the film is exploring. They have their routines, their humour, their bad decisions, their dignity, their favourite songs and their own strange little hopes. They remain people before they become anything else.

And this is where Kaurismäki's comedy becomes so important. His films can be incredibly sad and incredibly funny in the exact same moment, and the humour doesn't make the sadness disappear. If anything, it makes the sadness more human. Someone can be going through something enormous and still be annoyed about dinner. Someone can be completely alone and still make a joke. Someone can have almost nothing and still insist on looking good. There is something wonderfully stubborn about that.

In The Other Side of Hope, this becomes particularly important. The film follows Khaled, a Syrian refugee who arrives in Helsinki, and Wikström, a middle-aged Finnish man who leaves his wife and starts running a small restaurant. Their lives don't seem to have any obvious reason to intersect, and yet they do.

The film deals with migration and displacement, but Kaurismäki refuses to turn Khaled into an issue to be discussed. He remains a person. He is hungry, tired, lonely, funny, he falls in love, he makes friends, he listens to music and he wants somewhere to belong. The political becomes personal, and then somehow ordinary.

That is one of Kaurismäki's great strengths as a filmmaker: he can approach enormous subjects without allowing his characters to disappear underneath them. He doesn't need to make a grand statement about humanity because he can make the point through something much smaller. Someone gives someone else a meal. Someone offers a room. Someone decides to help. Someone stays. The kindness is hidden inside an ordinary action.

Even his restaurants, bars and apartments seem to operate this way. They become little islands where people who don't quite belong anywhere else can exist together for a while. There is something very beautiful about the fact that his version of community is rarely announced. Nobody stands up and says that they are creating a safe space. They simply start sharing things.

And this is where the title The Other Side of Hope starts to feel particularly beautiful. Hope in Kaurismäki's cinema is rarely grand. Nobody is suddenly saved and the world isn't repaired. There is no inspirational speech or perfect resolution. Hope is much smaller: someone opens a door, someone shares a table, someone gives you a job, someone believes you, someone says you can stay.

Perhaps that is also why Kaurismäki feels so connected to the idea behind The Housewarming Club. The whole idea of the Club starts with thinking about loneliness and what it takes to make somewhere feel like home. Kaurismäki seems to understand that home isn't always the place you come from. Sometimes it is simply the people who make room for you.

And perhaps this is why we love his films. Not because they give us an optimistic version of the world, because they don't. They know the world can be indifferent, absurd and sometimes cruel. But they insist on something anyway: that people can still be kind, that strangers can still become friends.

Kaurismäki doesn't need to tell us that these things matter. He simply films them as though they do.