Beyond Books is a column intended to alert Arts Knoxville readers to interesting music and video materials new to Knox County Public Library’s fabulous Sights & Sounds collection. As our collection of Blu-ray, 4K, and streaming titles continues to grow, we’ll also revisit classics and oddities as they become available in modern formats.
Watch for links or click on the covers: you’ll be invited to connect directly to KCPL’s catalog where you can place items on reserve and have them delivered to your favorite branch … or simply stream them at your convenience.
The Other Side of Hope
( Finland, 2017,
The late Swedish crime-writer Henning Mankell, progenitor of the “red snow” thriller sub-genre, usually had to kill innocent characters in order to prompt the same depth of cultural self-examination that the canny, casual Finnish film director Aki Kaurismäki instigates with deadpan comedy. Both men regularly introduce displaced persons who unintentionally challenge the sympathies and routines of apathetic or hostile communities. The mere presence of the stranger is an agent of change. Reactions of the locals vary from bullying and unimaginative meanness to miraculous acts of kindness to, now and again in Kaurismäki’s case, actual miracles. Watching, you can accept what these characters have to offer because they are so not special. The bigots and bums will remind you of folks you may know. They may remind you of your own unfortunate response to some undesirable set of circumstances. Seeing The Other Side of Hope, Kaurismäki’s most recent film, you will likely find yourself more strongly drawn to the quiet men, women and dogs whose collective light lifting and small exertions and hopeful expressions make it possible for some 7.6 billion people to get along on the surface of the same planet. If their gentleness, generosity and stillness also seem familiar, it may be due to their resemblance to the people we sometimes wish to be.
Khaled (Sherwan Haji) finds himself in Helsinki after fleeing Syria as a stowaway, buried in a ship’s coal hold. Khaled’s mission is to locate his sister Miriam (Niroz Haji, real-life sister of the male lead), his last living relative, whereabouts unknown. With a colorful cast of less desperate misfits, Khaled takes refuge in the kitchen of a restaurant called the Golden Pint. As part of what appears to be a mid-life crisis, Wikstrom (Sakari Kuosmanen) purchased the restaurant with poker winnings on the same day he left his wife. Wikstrom seems untroubled by the fact that no one wishes to pay to eat at the Golden Pint. The space is more valuable to the city as a sanctuary. The refugee and the restaurateur come to comfortable terms with the notion that having nothing in common is bond aplenty.
Khaled is denied asylum in Finland, but he manages to avoid deportation. The institutions designed to care for people like him and Miriam turn out to be worthless. But the individuals who staff those offices, once out of uniform, prove themselves brave and bold.
Kaurismäki does not moralize or minister. As in Le Havre, La Vie de Boheme, The Man Without A Past, and The Match Factory Trilogy, he presents scenes as if he is dealing cards randomly from a shuffled deck. Some scenes go better for Khaled than others. Some scenes depict mankind in a more flattering manner than others. After seeing The Other Side of Hope, you may recall those scenes and imagine how you would have affected them as a participant. True to his style, Kaurismäki separates most action and dialogue with interludes of vintage rock ‘n’ roll, emanating either from the odd antique jukebox or the odd antique busker. It is the tool of a skilled negotiator: before we address—or abandon—our differences, let us enjoy the fact that we can agree on the pleasures of some most excellent tremolo.
Waterboys
(Netherlands, 2016,
Victor Brouwer also happens to be a Swedish writer of mysteries, although he is not much of a mystery himself. His story is a tale too often told. The author is a cad, too handsome for his own good even while graying, and he must tour to promote his hackish wares. The wife, long-suffering, has moved out of the house with all possessions during the author’s most recent junket. We will learn over the course of the movie that Mrs. Brouwer also served as the author’s assistant and secretary. The fastidious organizing of Brouwer’s belongings, moved into a storage locker during his absence—impeccably stacked, as apparently only Scandinavians can—serves as our introduction to a woman we will never meet but will come to know. When the writer returns to his home, end of film, his keys will not fit the locks.
Victor (Leopold Witte) rings up his son Zack (Tim Linde) in search of news about his MIA mom, and also to fish for clues regarding what kind of evidence might be stacked against him. It turns out that Zack, an aspiring cellist, also got dumped today. Victor is due to depart for Scotland to promote The Corp at Salmon Neuk, his seventeenth mystery and the first to be translated into English. He drafts Zack to accompany him and, after Victor hits on Zack’s ex while signing her shelf of Brouwer mysteries, father and son are off on something that’s part lark and part blind date. The two men barely know each other. Whether they can come to own any concern or affection for one another remains to be seen.
As one who generates synopses, I tend to ignore them. So I had no idea when I started it why this movie is called Waterboys. I listened to the indie band the Waterboys while in college. That a film might be built upon the strength of their music never occurred to me. (On the DVD package there are two smiling males on the deck of a ferry, with water in the background. Waterboys. There you go.) During the weeks since I watched this, I have been trying to determine whether or not there is a group of songs that could better communicate the human tendency to long for a moment that has passed than the music of The Waterboys. It turns out that while the Brouwer lads are in Edinburgh, The Waterboys will be performing there as a homecoming finale to a world tour. And, surprise, it turns out that when Victor was Zack’s age, courting Zack’s mother, the music of The Waterboys was a factor. So we hear a lot of vintage Waterboys as the Brouwers fumble with their emotions and memories and, naturally, the women of Edinburgh.
The songs that Mike Scott writes and still sings for The Waterboys, with their intimations of Joyce and Keats and Yeats via Guthrie and Dylan, are little kits of space and time. They are transporting in an unusual way. During the 1980s, Scott was in his twenties and sang like some nasal art school prophet washed ashore. Now he’s pushing 60, the gangly bushy-haired sage, who seems not to have lost any of his upper range. Those two personas demonstrate pretty well the power and depth and breadth of his writing and delivery. As a kid he was somehow able to sing knowingly about risk and loss and experience. And as a geezer, he can still summon the seeker, certain of nothing, still reveling in the not-know.
Women in Sweden informed Zack and Victor that they were losers. One of them is overdue to grow up. One of them could stand to loosen up. Women in Scotland reminded them that remaining losers would be a matter of choice.
That was the river. This is the sea.
