Aki Kaurismäki’s The Other Side of Hope, which is playing this week at the Music Box, is the only recent film I know that merits comparison with the work of Charlie Chaplin. Like Chaplin, Kaurismäki (The Match Factory Girl, The Man Without a Past) blends humor and pathos in his look at a down-and-out individual by using the character’s misadventures to illuminate the plight of many others like him. Chaplin’s Little Tramp was remarkably versatile, taking in the form of numerous oppressed people: immigrants, the unemployed, Jews in Hitler’s Germany. That Chaplin always found comedy in the Tramp’s situations spoke to his imagination and sympathy—this strategy universalized the scenes he presented and increased audience sympathy with the hero. In Hope Kaurismäki shifts between comic and tragic modes, whereas Chaplin interwove them. Yet the effect is similar to what Chaplin achieved with The Great Dictator: the movie draws attention to a pressing global issue while functioning as crowd-pleasing entertainment.
The funniest passage of Hope comes near the end, when Wikström transforms his restaurant into a sushi bar in an ill-advised attempt to increase business. Neither he nor any of his employees know much about making sushi (or, for that matter, Japanese culture in general), yet they try operating as “Imperial Sushi” all the same. In a funny twist, a busload of Japanese tourists show up on the night of the grand reopening, and the staff has to feed all of them even after the kitchen runs out of fresh fish. This scene may be superfluous to the narrative, but it illuminates the characters’ good intentions in their attempt to understand other cultures. It’s a comic reiteration of the film’s grand theme—that people in comfortable situations can draw on their imagination and inherent sympathy to help refugees in need.
