Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Other Side of Hope
2017 · Aki Kaurismäki · The Other Side of Hope on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice the camera never moves and every shot faces forward. (camera)
Salminen locks the camera off in flat, frontal, symmetrical compositions, closer to a stage proscenium than to an observational film.
Payoff: The stillness makes even ordinary moments feel deliberately composed, like a held photograph.
Watch for single-color walls lit by one hard light source. (light)
Rooms are painted in deep, saturated single colors, a green wall or a red door, lit by a hard key with backgrounds dropping into black.
Payoff: A room's color does the work a musical score would normally do, setting the feeling before anyone speaks. In the reading: affective color. The reading calls this a color-image: a color that absorbs the whole scene's feeling instead of just decorating it.
Spot an object from decades ago sitting beside a modern one. (setting)
Rotary phones and gabardine coats share scenes with a mobile phone and a laptop, so the film never settles into one single decade.
Payoff: The mismatch argues that this situation is not new, only newly urgent.
Listen for a band playing a full song mid-scene. (sound)
Live musicians appear inside the fiction and perform straight through, rather than a score swelling in from outside the frame.
Payoff: The feeling comes from a visible performer inside the story, not from music piped in at you.
Notice how quickly a decision gets made without a scene about it. (cutting)
Kaurismäki cuts past exactly the moment a conventional film would dramatize, negotiation and doubt, and lands straight on the outcome.
Payoff: Kindness here looks already granted rather than argued for, so you never get to vote on it. In the reading: weak-links. The reading calls this weak links: cause loosened from effect, so an act of decency arrives without a debate scene first.
Once you have seen it
Watch Wikström's face stay perfectly still through a hard conversation. (performance)
Kuosmanen plays him with a granite impassivity that lets almost nothing show, so what matters plays out in posture instead of expression.
Payoff: What becomes visible is not his private feeling but the exact shape of what he is allowed to do for another person. In the reading: the-gest. The reading calls this the gest: a posture that exposes a social relation instead of displaying a private feeling.
Watch the one scene where the deadpan rule breaks. (performance)
In the asylum interview, Khaled recounts what happened to his family in one sustained, unadorned take, and the film's mannered surface briefly drops.
Payoff: The single rupture in style is where the film's plain testimony finally speaks for itself.
Watch the sushi-night disaster staged as flatly as the saddest scenes. (staging)
The Golden Pint's chaotic conversion into a sushi restaurant is shot with the same immobile formality as the film's scenes of despair.
Payoff: Comedy and cruelty get the same camera, which is the film's whole method compressed into one scene.
Notice the two opening stories running side by side before they meet. (structure)
Khaled's arrival and Wikström's departure play out in separate, self-contained openings until the two men collide behind the restaurant.
Payoff: A refugee's flight and a man's midlife exit turn out to be the same shape of story: starting over with nothing.
Carry this in: Watch the walls. Kaurismäki paints each room's feeling in a single, saturated color.