lasttimeisaw

"THE OTHER SIDE OF HOPE is a bifurcating story about a young Syrian asylum seeker Khaled Ali (Sherwan Haji) and Waldemar Wikström (Kuosmanen), a middle-aged local career-changing restauranteur, both want to start their lives anew, but life is not fair, Wikström can scoop a sizable fortune overnight in a poker game whereas Ali's heart-rending plea has zero chance to pass the bureaucratic flintiness. But their paths eventually are crossed, comedic episodes alternate with dramatic occurrences (the restaurant's inutile attempt to wheel out Japanese cuisine is a total gas!), the big reunion of Ali and his sister Miriam (played by Sherwan's own sister Niroz) pays off grandly without falling into a drippy trap, Ali trusts Miriam's decision to apply for asylum seeker even though he knows from experience it is a tall order, and the ambivalent coda (with the racism and identitarian menace remains the bane for an immigrant) is marvelously touched up by a canine tenderness, which also crops up in FALLEN LEAVES."

-

"FALLEN LEAVES is a romance, but with a difference, Ansa (Pöysti) and Holappa (Vatanen) are two working-class lonesome souls in their late 30s or early 40s. She is a zero-hour contract employee in a supermarket and he is a sandblaster, neither manages to keep it for too long, but at least in Finland, they are not distressed about seeking a new job. As a matter of fact, distress is something one can hardly detect in Kaurismäki's corpus. No matter how dire and miserable the situations are, his actors's poker face remains immutably impenetrable, and unlike "a deadpan look", Kaurismäki's trademark expression betrays no self-consciousness. His "subtraction" of emotions through impassivity and stillness of the body language is an acquired taste, but in FALLEN LEAVES, it reaches a form of abstraction, a simplicity, as we watch Ansa and Holappa masterfully code their intentions and thoughts barely pulling a facial muscle, it is droll, but also amazingly candid. Both Pöysti and Vatanen are real finds, especially the former, accessorizing her performative reduction with an evocative aroma of tristesse and resilience."

-

"Without emplacing too many turn-ups for the books, THE PASSENGER earnestly invests its time and attention in carving out Randy's new-found confidence in dissuading Benson from doing something irrational and violent. There are moments when it seems they can be quite a perfect fit because each is beneficent to the other, and maybe, a new lease on life can be granted even to a mortal sinner like Benson. Such fancy is punctured when a facile, workaday suicide-by-cop solution transpires in the end, and we still have no inkling what makes Benson such an enormity. As if people like him do not deserve salvation after all the effort the film endeavors to convince us he is not the impersonation of pure evil. Compared to Randy, Benson is the one who is more hurt for a savior, it is a pity Randy and the film fall by the wayside."

-