The Other Side of Hope

It's a rare feat for a director whose films, from their muted humour and dated-seeming mise-en-scène, to their use of flat, unexpressive, Bressonian close-ups of characters, have always seemed weirdly outside of time.

Winsome, sweet, and often very funny, The Other Side of Hope is more of the same from Kaurismäki, and thank God for that.

The deadpan style of the acting functions as a vaccine against sentimentality, but there is no doubting the sincerity of this movie’s motives or the effectiveness of its methods.

There’s nothing adorable or convoluted about this collision of worlds. The Other Side of Hope makes room for jokes about bad restaurants alongside stark monologues about the horrors of Syria. It operates in an atmosphere of constant conflicting emotions.

There aren’t really any surprises in The Other Side of Hope; it’s more like witnessing the ongoing cultivation of a humane philosophy. But the film is devilishly funny, economically constructed (the demise of Wikström’s marriage is shown in wordless images) and decked out in the director’s dismal palette of cobalt blue, moss green and burnt-marmalade orange.

More than an hour passes before Khaled and Wikström’s stories intersect, and though it would be an exaggeration to say each redeems the other, in this film the other side of hope is not despair, but decency.

The Other Side of Hope fulfills the vague sense of its aspirational title as a film limited in scope and led only by the guidance of its maker's skeptical positivity.