Evelyne Didi

Three struggling artists try to make passable livings in Paris despite knock backs and tragedies.

Isabelle Adjani plays Elle, a provocative 19-year-old whose move, with her mother and sick father, to a sleepy Provence village sets the locals afire with lust and gossip. She soon finds a suitor in gentle Pin-Pon (Alain Souchon), the local mechanic, and they marry shortly after. Then the tone shifts, when a dark secret emerges from her past...

Aki Kaurismäki returns to France with this sun-kissed utopian parable. One of his most politically resonant films, Le Havre echoes The Man Without a Past’s ruminations on community and resilience, albeit this time (via a hat tip to Carl Dreyer’s Ordet) with a nod to the vagaries of the divine.