Le Havre · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A boy stands in the water at the end of a quay. The police have opened the shipping container he arrived in and are counting the people who were inside it. He doesn't run and he doesn't shout. He stands there in the harbour and looks up at the old man on the stone above him, a shoeshiner with his box. Nothing in the shot hurries. The camera doesn't move.

What happens next is the whole argument of Le Havre, and it is almost embarrassingly simple. The old man acts.

That sounds like nothing. In 2011 it was close to a scandal of form.

Deleuze divided cinema into two arrangements. In the first, someone perceives a situation, is affected by it, and does something that changes it. Perception, feeling, action; the loop closes; the cut serves the loop. He called that family the movement-image, and its motor the sensory-motor link. His claim was that the link broke, roughly after the war, in the rubble of Italy. Characters began seeing things they could not act on. They became watchers, and time started appearing on screen as itself rather than as the measure of movement. That is the time-image.

By 2011 the European migration film had settled into a house style of powerlessness: handheld, procedural, grim, a camera trailing people who can do nothing about what is being done to them. Kaurismäki went the other way. He locked the camera on a tripod, shot 35mm in saturated primaries, and handed the loop back. Marcel sees the boy. Marcel takes him in. The act works.

He is not naive about it. A police computer and a mobile phone turn up in a world otherwise furnished with rotary telephones, a jukebox, sit-up radios and tin advertising signs. Deleuze has a name for an object like that: a demark, the thing that breaks the customary chain and forces you to read rather than recognise. The anachronism isn't nostalgia dressing. It marks the deportation machinery as the one thing in the film running on current technology. Everything capable of kindness is obsolete.

Deleuze also splits the action-image in two. In the large form, a global situation presses down until an act big enough transforms it. In the small form, you get the act first and infer the situation from it. Le Havre is almost entirely small form, and Timo Linnasalo's editing is why. Scenes begin after their beginnings and end before their ends. Establishing material is skipped. A journey to Calais and back is a handful of shots. Deleuze calls an elliptical gesture that implies an unseen situation an index of lack, and the film runs on them: ninety minutes carrying a plot a conventional treatment would need two hours to lay out. You are handed a gesture and asked to supply the world it came from. That habit of supplying is exactly what the ending will ask of you.

The neighbourhood works the same way. Bar, bakery, grocer's, Marcel's kitchen, the hospital room, each with a fixed geometry the film returns to unchanged, so the city becomes a set of stations rather than a continuous space. Deleuze's name for the zig-zag joining places that don't otherwise connect is the line of the universe. Marcel's trajectory is the only continuity Le Havre has. Salminen holds those stations in frontal, centred compositions, characters set against flat planes of colour, and keeps finding the doorway and the window: Idrissa through a hatch, Marcel in a bar door. Shelter and confinement get the same shape.

The bodies carry the rest. Actors enter, take a position, deliver, hold. Gestures are single and complete: a hat removed, a glass lifted, a hand set flat on a table. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, calls this the gest, a posture that exposes a social relation instead of a psychology. André Wilms plays Marcel as a destitute man of unbreakable courtesy, and that courtesy is not a character trait. It is a class position held in the body. Kati Outinen's Arletty is the other pole. Deleuze distinguishes the reflecting face, immobile, holding one quality, from the intensive face, where micro-movements build toward a threshold. Outinen holds the first so completely that the smallest softening becomes the second, and Kaurismäki's cutting knows it: reaction shots held a beat past comfort. That extra beat is where the film keeps its feelings. Timo Salminen's colour does much of the rest, built in the world rather than in a grade, from art direction and hard gelled light. A red door, a yellow lamp, deep blue walls, black shadow with no fill. Colour absorbs a scene here rather than decorating it, which is why a film this static never goes inert.

None of this is realism, and the film's relation to Bazin is the interesting part. Bazin's case for cinema rested on the photographic record, on the faith that what you see stood in front of the lens. Kaurismäki keeps that contract absolutely: 35mm, no effects, no compositing, at the moment his contemporaries were going digital. Then he uses the credibility of the record to underwrite two miracles no realist account of the world will support. The negative doesn't lie, and it doesn't much care what it is asked to certify.

Which is where the film's real nerve is. Late Deleuze argued that political cinema can no longer address "the people," because the people are missing, and that what remains is fabulation: not depicting a community but telling one into existence. The baker, the grocer, the barkeeper, all of them broke, closing ranks around a child, are not sociology. They are a proposal. The film never argues for them. It shows a solidarity the world does not currently supply and lets the gap do the work, which is why it reads as more politically legible than the naturalist films it stood against. The one person who informs is played by Jean-Pierre Léaud. Film history's child, grown up to call the police.

The lineage is unusually literal, and specific as craft. From Carné's Le Quai des brumes, the port built as an enclosed stage rather than found as a location, the fog, the trench coat. From Hôtel du Nord, Arletty's name and the device the film runs on: shopkeepers operating as a chorus to hide one person from the police. From Ozu's Late Spring, the tripod-locked low frontal camera and interiors composed through successive door apertures, which becomes Salminen's doorway-and-hatch framing. From Becker's Le Trou, escape as manual craft, hands on objects, faces held in silence; Pierre Étaix's doctor is named Becker. From Vigo's L'Atalante, the quay as lyrical material and the precedent for resolving a beloved's illness by an openly non-realist gesture. From Bresson's Pickpocket, the model instead of the actor, and a closing grace the narrative has not earned. Kaurismäki did not collect these as homage. He built a working machine out of them.

Forward, the influence has been permission rather than imitation, which is not nothing. It kept an anti-naturalist, comic, frankly utopian address to a live emergency available at the moment the subject was hardening into one documentary idiom.

The standing objection is the ending: whether fable licence covers a cured cancer as readily as a successful escape. Take that as the film's question rather than its flaw. Kaurismäki has spent ninety minutes training you to be handed a gesture and supply the world around it. At the end he hands you two, and the world they require is one that does not exist yet. Whether you can supply it is what the film is actually about.