When a human smuggling plan goes awry, Idrissa (Blondin Miguel), a Gabonese teenager finds himself alone and on the run in the French port city of Le Havre. With the local police commissioner leaning on his best detective (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) for a quick capture and the newspapers speculating on Idrissa’s Al-Qaida links, his situation is precarious.

Luckily, he has some help in the form of shambling shoeshiner Marcel (André Wilms) and the close-knit community of his rundown dockside quartier. Can a man who keeps his lifesavings in a biscuit tin, a couple of shopkeepers and an ageing rocker keep Idrissa out of the clutches of the police? “Miracles do happen,” as a doctor ventures when consoling Marcel’s very ill wife Arletty (Kati Outinen).

Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki imports his familiar stilted comic style (one for fans of Wes Anderson or Wim Wenders) and his longtime leading lady Outinen, but he plays up to the Frenchiness with lots of aperitifs, perfect produce, and accordion on the soundtrack. If you like your France more Tati than tatty, you’ll enjoy the aesthetic and the gentle comedy of this film.

However, it’s a frothy confection, and I can see how some viewers might be non-plussed with such a romantic treatment of the theme of asylum seekers in Europe. If there’s a rosy, checked-tablecloth sort of a glow around the little community of kind individuals who take up Idrissa’s cause, you could read it as a metonymic stand-in for the general principle of hospitality, choosing to see individuals as people first and a problem second.

With its kooky score (slide guitar and melodramatic swells of strings along with the aforementioned accordion), its unlikely reversals and its deadpan delivery, Le Havre isn’t selling itself as social realism. But as an optimistic fable, it pleases immensely.