Toivon tuolla puolen (Aki Kaurismäki, 2017)

The iconic director's 17th feature film outing is a revisit to the theme of Third World immigrants interacting with Europeans, as with his last film, Le Havre. This time however, the director is on more solid ground with the setting moved to Finland and his anger is more pronounced, with racist thugs turning up at times to victimise the main character, a young Syrian asylum seeker, who is also treated unfairly by the system that decides to send him back to Aleppo after judging the situation there to be not perilous enough to warrant asylum.
The structure of The Other Side of Hope is one with two parallel storylines: the asylum seeker's tribulations and a middle-aged travelling shirt salesman who leaves his wife to somehow manage to set up a restaurant in Helsinki. That these storylines exist in isolation from each other for so long into the film is its major weakness: the tone in the former is serious, whereas with the Finns it's overwhelmingly comic. Correspondingly, when we get the characters staring wordlessly into space or the camera in Kaurismäki's emblematic style, the effect with the asylum seekers is one of suffering and saudade, while with the less-troubled Finns it conveys a broader range of emotion from dismay to disapproval or hostility.
Nevertheless, this is Kaurismäki's most complete and satisfying film for a long time, and not just because it's a great exercise in ticking off literally every one of his trademarks (characters smoking incessantly as a substitute for conversation, sparse deadpan dialogue, protracted interludes of awful music, dismal anachronistic interiors and expressionist lighting, to name just a few). By the time the restaurateur takes the would-be immigrant gruffly under his wing, we've been waiting for it a long while and it's truly gratifying.

7/10