At first glance, Le Havre has all the makings of a modern tear-jerker, but instead, the film goes bravely where few films about immigration or terminal illness have gone before—towards a happy ending.
Once upon a time, in a faraway land, a young African refugee was discovered in a cargo container, and a shoe-shiner’s wife was dying of cancer. Wait a minute—“once upon a time”? This doesn’t sound like a fairy tale. Well, don’t let the specifics of this little European film fool you. Le Havre is just as much a fairy tale as the stories we heard when we were kids.
In the film, Marcel Marx—the aforementioned shoe-shiner—has long been settled into the doldrums of street employment. Things change when his wife is whisked away to the hospital with stomach pains, and soon after, Marcel meets Idrissa, a refugee on the lam from the immigration police. Despite their unequivocal differences, Marcel agrees to help the boy reunite with his family in London. And his wife—is her tumor really, as she tells him, “extremely benign”? Wrapped up in the boy’s escape, Marcel hardly has a chance to visit her…
At first glance, Le Havre has all the makings of a modern tear-jerker, but instead, the film goes bravely where few films about immigration or terminal illness have gone before—towards a happy ending.
Impossible? This is the movies, after all.