Le Havre Film Analysis

The film Le Havre (2011), directed and written by Aki Kaurismäki and starring André Wilms, follows Marcel Marx, a poor shoe shiner living in Le Havre, France. Early in the film, the French police find a group of African immigrants hiding in a shipping container. One of them makes a run for it and escapes their capture. Idrissa, the young boy who escapes, ends up running into Marcel, who offers him food, lies to the police about seeing him, and invites him into his home. Throughout the film, Marcel takes care of Idrissa and does everything he can to get Idrissa to London, where his mother lives now. The film does a relatively good job of portraying the struggle undocumented immigrants face in France and sheds a positive light on them, but it should have given more of a voice to immigrants throughout the film. The three main characters in this film are Marcel, Idrissa, and Inspector Monet, who is in charge of the search for Idrissa. The audience views various perspectives of undocumented immigrants through these characters’ eyes. Through Inspector Monet, the film does a great job of showing how police officials view undocumented immigrants in France. It is obvious from the film that Monet feels much more sympathetically toward Idrissa and immigrants in general than other police officials. In the scene where Idrissa first escapes, one of the …show more content…
It successfully displays the inhumane ways police treat undocumented immigrants in France, while also showing how individual people can have sympathy for and help immigrants. However, at the end of the day, the film does not give enough of a voice to actual immigrant characters. Giving Idrissa more lines and letting him have more character development would have made Le Havre a much more interesting film and would have given a voice to people who are too often