Aki Kaurismaki: Kaurismaki

Blondin Miguel Dept: The work of Finland's Aki Kaurismaki falls into this last category. His latest film Le Havre is an oddly endearing, shrewdly comic drama about illegal immigration set in the French port town. Where most any other director would milk the tale's torment for everything it's worth, Kaurismaki has his cast play it straight, delivering life-important lines as if they were reading the phone book. It's classic Kaurismaki, and it works like a charm, injecting offbeat humour into the most serious situations and bringing the narrative to another place by consistently defying our expectations, according to Montreal Gazette. Le Havre posits Wilms as Marcel Marx, a solemn shoeshine man who hides a young African refugee Blondin Miguel from the authorities, while his wife Arletty Kati Outinen lies sick in the hospital and film is notable for its ability to feel real - to take us into a situation and give us the impression we're living it - or to sweep us away into Hollywood-style fantasy. But there is a less-celebrated strain of cinema that goes in the opposite direction, toward surrealism. "He hates emotion," said Andr Wilms, the French actor and Kaurismaki regular, in a sit-down interview during the Toronto International Film Festival in September. "He wants it to be very reduced, like Buster Keaton. He says, 'Play it like an old gentleman. Don't make me crazy with your actor tricks.' " (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.