Le Havre (Aki Kaurismäki, 2011)

My first Kaurismäki film: a wonderful blend of beautiful framing/lighting/cinematography blended with Tati-esque comedy and Fassbinder-type acting create a surreal world where problems are always around the corner... with the solutions never trailing too far behind. Also a celebration of film, actual film that is, not digital. The film's color palette and graininess seem impossible in digital filmmaking. Looking forward to exploring more of the auteur's body of work.

Daniel Kasman on the film (full article here):
"Aki Kaurismäki's blend of fable-style plotting, classical studio storytelling, and a real world context and social message, has little to do with this unusual mix of several usual kinds of films. It is, instead, lead actor’s André Wilms voice, the tenor of his line readings; a hilarious and moving collaboration between Wilms and Kaurismäki's direction, lending his spoken words a clipped, positive upward inflection in his sentences that gives the ends of lines a quality of affirmation, an enthusiastic aphorism, the punch line to a joke."