619 Le Havre

[JPJ]

Le Havre just won prestigious Louis Delluc Prize for best French movie of 2011.I'd assume that for Kaurismäki personally this must be bigger thing if he'd win an Oscar.Among previous decades winners are films of Truffaut,Malle and Bresson.

[knives]

I don't he cares about any award whether they be Delluc, Oscar, or Cannes.

[MichaelB]

From my limited acquaintance with the man (I met him several times in the early 1990s when I worked for his main UK distributor), I think he'd secretly be quite chuffed to win a prize also won by Robert Bresson.

[JPJ]

I don't he cares about any award whether they be Delluc, Oscar, or Cannes.

You might be right Knives, but on the other hand this is a special case.As far as I know this is a first time the award goes to non-french speaking directors film.

[JPJ]

Le Havre's release date on blu-ray and dvd in Finland is feb.22nd.Only finnish/swedish subs confirmed.This might be first Kaurismäki film on blu although I have no idea,for example,what Japanese have released.I believe Japan was the first country to release his films on dvd.

[Alan Smithee]

Forgive me if it's a repost I scanned through these pages quickly but Le Havre is on Criterion's Hulu now.

[rs98762001]

Forgive me if it's a repost I scanned through these pages quickly but Le Havre is on Criterion's Hulu now.

...but not on the shortlist for Academy consideration, which is both depressing and depressingly unsurprising.

[MichaelB]

...but not on the shortlist for Academy consideration, which is both depressing and depressingly unsurprising.

I don't imagine Kaurismäki cares two hoots. And I also suspect his no-show last time didn't exactly help!

[JPJ]

...but not on the shortlist for Academy consideration, which is both depressing and depressingly unsurprising.

I don't imagine Kaurismäki cares two hoots. And I also suspect his no-show last time didn't exactly help!

Or this letter(or part of it)dated march 18th 2003 to academy president Frank Pierson:"We are not living in the most glamorous moment of the history of mankind. Therefore I nor anybody else from Sputnik Ltd, can participate in the Oscar gala at the same time the government of the US is preparing a crime against humanity for the purpose of shameless economic interests."

[wendersfan]

Finally saw this last night, and I loved it, like I love almost every Kaurismäki film. Yes, it was predictable and yes, it was kinda hokey, but who cares.

[MichaelB]

Finally saw this last night, and I loved it, like I love almost every Kaurismäki film. Yes, it was predictable and yes, it was kinda hokey, but who cares.

That's pretty much my reaction. I completely see where Zedz is coming from, but by this stage in his career Kaurismäki's predictability (or, to be fair, reliability and consistency) contributes as much to the pleasure of watching it as anything else.

Particular favourite moments (big spoiler for L.A. Confidential in the first if you haven't seen it):

Spoiler

The surprise appearance of Jean-Pierre Léaud and his use of a mobile phone as an instrument of evil - a bit of shock casting almost as effective as that lovely pig farmer from Babe turning out to be a crook in L.A. Confidential. Kaurismäki confirmed to me that we are supposed to read him as an Antoine Doinel turned conformist reactionary in his old age. And the mobile phone is the one piece of genuinely modern technology in the film - literally everything else could have been shot fifty or sixty years ago.

and

Spoiler

The double happy ending with the miraculous cure for cancer followed by the appearance of the cherry blossom - Kaurismäki said that he's very keen on happy endings because life is basically shit and he wants his audience to leave his films feeling positive, albeit momentarily. And because the subject matter of Le Havre is particularly grim, he decided to serve up a double happy ending this time. I pointed out that it was actually a triple happy ending if you were of a suitably sexist bent, since the last line of the film is something like "Right, I'll put the dinner on".

Incidentally, the pineapple - the one bit that everyone remembers! - was totally improvised at the time of shooting because it was the nearest prop available to hand, but he realised long after the film had been completed that it could be interpreted as a reference to Buñuel's Nazarín.

[jbeall]

Le Havre was my first Kaurismaki film, so it certainly didn't feel predictable to me. I loved it, and am definitely digging his proletariat trilogy out of my kevyip this evening. I was especially struck by how well Kaurismaki makes shots with virtually no action (cinematic tableaux vivants?) gut-bustingly funny. This was especially the case with the barflies; every time the camera came to rest on their sad visages, my wife and I were chortling, and not, I think, because of any class bias (we both come from blue-collar backgrounds). The way Kaurismaki manages to get his wry observational humor across in these still shots was what I took away from the film.

Interesting comment about Leaud and the cell phone. The film has an unabashed love/nostalgia for the material culture of a bygone France, but I hadn't thought about the one implement of contemporary technology because its appearance is so brief.

[JPJ]

Just watched the brand new Finnish blu of Le Havre. The good news is that there is, surprisingly, also english subtitles but unfortunately the disc is in 1080i/25fps! It still looks very good but anyone who's interested in this should probably wait for an eventual Criterion release.

[kinjitsu]

Kaurismäki interviewed at The Scotsman

[MichaelB]

Kaurismäki interviewed at The Scotsman

Oh dear. That's the kind of interview I really dread conducting - it's only happened to me once (Alexei Balabanov), and I'd be very glad not to repeat the experience.

By contrast, Kaurismäki was positively garrulous when I interviewed him - I must have got him on a good day. Or, more likely, I reckoned he'd be bored with talking about Le Havre directly and deliberately talked about other subjects from 1930s French cinema to the impending death of 35mm to the current situation in the Eurozone (all of which are relevant to the film to various degrees).

[newland]

I usually like Kaurismaki's films a lot (must have seen 90% of them) but I just couldn't stand Le Havre. It reminded me of the old-fashioned cuteness that makes me cringe in Amelie or in Hugo (I never thought I would end up putting these 3 directors in the same bag). La vie de bohème was one of my favorite films by Kaurismaki, but Le Havre feels out of breath, not charming, and really more embarrassing than amusing.

[JPJ]

Just found this clip:Aki Kaurismäki and Peter Von Bagh introducing Le Havre at Midnight Sun film festival june 2011.Amusing jokes and embarrasing accents?
The clip is mostly in english but after the screening the lights go out and they start to talk in Finnish:
AK-Why don't you talk your usual nonsense?
PVB-I can't think of anything!
AK-mumbles something about Battleship Potemkin(the film was screened at the festival)
PVB-Potemkin is crap compared to this!(joking of course)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67zmJpUdxQY" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[bigP]

Kaurismäki in (relatively) good form in yesterday's Guardian interview.

[MichaelB]

Kaurismäki in (relatively) good form in yesterday's Guardian interview.

Annoyingly, he seems to have told exactly the same anecdotes to pretty much everyone who interviewed him at Soho House on that day - I saw him a few hours earlier, but my interview hasn't been published yet. I can certainly confirm that he was on good form, though: I've met him several times over the last twenty years, and I've never known him to be quite this chatty.

(I say "annoyingly" because I went to some trouble to edit out stuff that I'd heard before, but I obviously couldn't second-guess other people's interviews that hadn't been published at the time! Still, at least all the stuff he told me about the influence of the Popular Front films seems to be unique to my piece - at least so far...)

[bigP]

Kaurismäki in (relatively) good form in yesterday's Guardian interview.

Annoyingly, he seems to have told exactly the same anecdotes to pretty much everyone who interviewed him at Soho House on that day - I saw him a few hours earlier, but my interview hasn't been published yet.

Do you think that's reflective of Kaurismäki's sense of humour or more his disdain for promotoing his own films? I can't imagine how annoying that must be as a journalist but something seems very sly and knowing about this type of behaviour. I'm particularly drawn to this part of the interview, which had me laughing out loud, and seems to show Kaurismäki taking great pleasure in setting up a prank that will make both his target (the bar lady) and the audience (Simon Hattenstone) feel uncomfortable, whilst "Finland's greatest film-maker smiles":

He is waiting for a member of staff at Soho House in London to tell him to put out his fag, and he is not disappointed. "I'm sorry, sir, we have told you, you can't smoke in here." Kaurismäki looks surprised, as if this is the first he's heard of it, apologises and throws his lit cigarette into a glass of water. The waitress picks up the glass to take it away. Kaurismäki shouts, as if he's just been mugged. "That's my water! That's my water!" She runs away. Finland's greatest film-maker smiles.

MichaelB, just curious as to where your interview is to be published? Will it be in S&S this month?

[MichaelB]

Do you think that's reflective of Kaurismäki's sense of humour or more his disdain for promotoing his own films? I can't imagine how annoying that must be as a journalist but something seems very sly and knowing about this type of behaviour.

To be fair to him, it's impossible to come up with different answers to the same questions all the time - Steven Soderbergh once wrote that he was determined to do this when doing the press rounds for sex, lies and videotape, but even with the best of intentions he had to admit defeat. And I was very conscious at the time that some of Kaurismäki's anecdotes were word-for-word identical to ones I'd heard from him elsewhere, so I generally tried to eliminate those from my piece (unless they were particularly relevant, of course).

Sadly, we didn't get any entertaining altercations with the barmaid (we were out on the balcony, where he could smoke thanks to Soho House being a private members' club) - there was a brief diversion when a police helicopter flew overhead and Kaurismäki said that MI5 was coming to get him, and I said "surely it would be MI6, since you're foreign?", which led to a discussion of Cold War literature (he prefers John Le Carré to Len Deighton, in case you were wondering), but I'm afraid I had to cut all of that from the final piece as we'd drifted much too far away from Le Havre!

MichaelB, just curious as to where your interview is to be published? Will it be in S&S this month?

Yes - which may well be out this week, but I haven't seen it yet.

[JPJ]

Kaurismäki in (relatively) good form in yesterday's Guardian interview.

That was quite bizarre even by his standards.The comment about his brother was probably an outright lie.Finland's biggest newspaper just reported about the interview on their website with a provocative headline:"Drunken Kaurismäki is talking about the killing of the rich in an interview".

[MichaelB]

That was quite bizarre even by his standards.The comment about his brother was probably an outright lie.

Yes, he told me that the North Korean bank takeover depicted in The Man without a Past actually happened. I'm pretty sure that did end up in my final piece - I just reported it with an equally straight face.

Unlike the Guardian piece, my interview is presented in Q&A form, although I trimmed my contribution to the bone to give him as much space as possible - which had the happy side-effect of making him seem surprisingly garrulous.

[JPJ]

Another interview,more sober this time.
http://www.littlewhitelies.co.uk/interv ... maki-18011" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[MichaelB]

Kaurismäki on the cover of Sight & Sound.

The subtitle reads "Don't tell anybody, but I have a tender heart".

The interview's print-only (I haven't seen the final version myself yet!), but they've published their review of Le Havre on the website.