Minimalist yet stylistically recognizable, unsparing but sentimental, the oeuvre of meticulous Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismäki is so distinct in both technique and tone that he practically makes up his own genre. He’s a purveyor of deeply human stories, often utilizing only the barest of circumstances to paint his borderline Bressonian portraits of lonely, broken people who nonetheless manage to find a smidgen of hope in each other’s common struggles. His latest, Fallen Leaves, embodies all the fascinating contradictions that make his work so unique. At first glance, the film can appear rather slight, a romantic comedy so rigidly austere in its execution that it barely registers as either comedic or romantic. Yet this is exactly Kaurismäki’s intention. His characters exist within a world obsessed with and in many ways defined by the cinema, but the lives they endure are very much not like the movies.
Like much of Kaurismäki’s work, Fallen Leaves is set in Helsinki, though the world it depicts feels beamed in from an alternate reality just slightly adjacent to our own. Alma Pöysti plays Ansa (“trapped” in Finnish), a single woman who works a dead-end job stocking shelves at a supermarket, otherwise spending her lonely nights eating microwaved meals and listening to endless news about the invasion of Ukraine on the radio. Her existence is only slightly less bleak than that of Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), an industrial worker and alcoholic who every day seems to sink ever further into the endless chasm of the bottle. They lock eyes one night at a karaoke bar and, mutually drawn to each other’s solitude, begin an awkward courtship in fits and starts. To say that their romance is far from dreamy would be an understatement. Holappa loses Ansa’s number immediately after she gives it to him, almost extinguishing any chance of them reuniting. Even bleaker, the film they see on their initial date is Jim Jarmusch’s 2019 effort, The Dead Don’t Die. “I’ve never laughed so much,” Ansa says. Yeah, you and no one else.
The presence of real-world elements such as Jarmusch’s film and the Russo-Ukrainian War are especially curious because Kaurismäki otherwise populates the film with physical details that feel untethered from contemporary time or place. Ansa’s vintage radio feels ripped from a ‘60s period piece, whilst the movie’s muted Technicolor grading suggests even the filmmaking itself could be from another era. When troubling real-world realities invade these retro environs, they begin to feel less nostalgic than purgatorial. The effect is to create a physical landscape that feels concurrently distancing and compassionate, as if it could either be heaven or torment depending on where you stand in the societal ladder. Kaurismäki has long used his work to critique the economic and political injustices that pervade both his home country and the world abroad, often telling stories of lower-class workers and directly tackling issues like immigration in 2011’s Le Havre and 2017’s The Other Side of Hope. While Fallen Leaves is less explicitly political than those works, it still paints a gently damning portrait of economic and social inequities that are difficult to escape.
The subtlety of Kaurismäki’s deadpan humor, especially within the context of Ansa and Holappa’s frustrating cyclical plight, is in how their emotional realities reflect that of the equally despondent people around them. Their circumstances, while serious, are hardly unique. Poor Holappa is just one of the many worn-down and depressive alcoholics that haunt Helsinki’s sparsely-populated dives after dark. But in portraying these people with empathy and just a hint of drollness, the director removes the risk of audience judgement and even provides a spark of hope for renewal.
Even before this spark is ignited, there’s something darkly humorous about Holappa’s inability to understand when Ansa offers him an aperitif during a dinner date, continually prodding for more alcohol as if she were a barmaid. The classic push-and-pull narrative seen in most romantic comedies is present here but drawn out to such an extended and precarious degree that the tease becomes almost unbearable. You just want these characters to find happiness, but Kaurismäki isn’t going to give it to them so easily. The beauty of Fallen Leaves is in the uncertainty of their romance. To risk happiness is its own challenge, especially when you’ve become so used to being miserable that wallowing in the emotion almost feels like a comfort. Change is the great fundamental process any character in a story must face, and Kaurismäki recognizes the pleasure in locating the elusive moment where that shift begins to take place.
At an extremely brisk though tidy 81 minutes, Fallen Leaves will be too slight and open-ended for some. Admittedly, it’s a film that takes some time to sink in, especially since so much of what’s meaningful is in texture of the direction and performances rather than the story. Tonally, comparisons could be made to the work of Roy Andersson, another brilliant filmmaker who explores the melancholic nature of human existence, albeit in a much more directly absurdist fashion. There’s also, of course, similarities to the listless and sardonic wit of Jarmusch, a friend of Kaurismäki’s – which may be why The Dead Don’t Die is featured at all (one slight criticism: he could’ve picked a much better film). Performance wise, both Pöysti and Vatanen do a lot with very little. “We were given tips such as don’t look into the camera, don’t rehearse and don’t read the script too much. It’s all done in one take, so we can’t screw up,” Pöysti remarked in an interview earlier this year. They don’t, and the result is a modest and achingly sincere work that finds real, meaningful connection in an alienated world not so separate from our own.
Photo courtesy of Mubi
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