Le Havre

In Brief: A pitch-perfect little movie from Aki Kaurismäki, Le Havre (2001) feels much more simple and old-fashioned than it is upon examination. Sure, the story of a reasonably shiftless French shoeshine man who befriends an illegal immigrant black boy is aimed at playing on our sentimentality, but it does so with piercingly deadpan wit and sly cinematic touches that are far more clever than they appear. A sweetly human and humane film, Le Havre has everything to recommend it and nothing — apart from subtitles and a lack of easily marketed names — working against it. Its shaggy, often improbable story has an immediate appeal that only grows as the film moves along in its almost defiantly old-fashioned way. There’s nothing flashy about it even though Kaurismäki slyly gooses nearly everything with subtle cinematic touches that are likely to go unnoticed, but not unresponded to by his audience. It’s the kind of movie that can be called “feel-good” without any sense of derision due to its utterly deadpan presentation.