An 81-minute, dryly funny, pop-inflected romance, Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves at times feels like the lightest of movies, but it also takes place against a canvas of soul-crushing gloom. That’s nothing new for the legendary Finnish director, whose characters’ deadpan submersion often feels like the only sane response to a cold, callous world. But this is one of his more hopeful works. There’s a smile waiting to be born in Fallen Leaves, and we can feel it coming.
When we first meet Ansa (Alma Pöysti), she’s pricing items in a supermarket, checking their sell-by dates and tossing out the ones that have expired. Other employees go through the same motions, the repetitive work just a part of entire lives swallowed by routine. Ansa takes one expired item home every night for dinner, when she sits in her tiny flat and listens to the radio news about the war in Ukraine. Elsewhere in Helsinki, Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) works at a construction site, a trusty liquor bottle seemingly never too far out of reach. Over and over, we see the sheer waste that surrounds these characters: expired food, demolished buildings, rusted pipe fittings, scraps of metal. The devastation in Ukraine, offered through regular radio reports, feels like an extension of a world that doesn’t need or want humans in it. These characters themselves seem just one step away from being discarded somewhere in this cold, industrial cityscape.
Yes, it’s a comedy and a romance. But for most of its running time, Fallen Leaves plays out as a series of disappointments. Ansa and Holappa meet at a karaoke bar that they occasionally frequent with their workmates, a warm place festooned with classic movie posters, but from there on out it’s mostly missed connections. Holappa can’t hold down a job because he’s got a bit of an attitude; the drinking doesn’t help, either. Ansa is proud, headstrong, and poor. When Holappa comes over for dinner one night, she has to go to the store and buy a second plate and a second fork.
Though they’re drawn in simple lines, there’s a profound longing to these characters. Kaurismäki’s films have always had a special connection with music, and the songs here — be they karaoke performances of rock, folk, and classical tunes, or a showstopping appearance late in the film by the Finnish indie-pop duo Maustetytöt (“I’m a prisoner here forever / Even the graveyard is by fences bound / When my earthly term is finally done / You’ll just dig me deeper into the groundâ€) — reflect an unexpressed despair, a growing sense that there’s got to be more to life than this. The movie and its textures speak for these people, who remain tight-lipped and stone-faced, though always on the verge of discovering something about themselves.
Kaurismäki emerged in the 1980s, a dry trickster who merged the misfit cinema of Rainer Werner Fassbinder with the artful deadpan of Wenders, Jarmusch, and others. Over the years, he’s stuck fervently to his aesthetic, making his distinctive films without ceding any ground to profit or fashion. The movies feel stripped down — the stories are basic, the characters spare, the emotions muted — but like great poems, they contain untold depths. There’s life boiling under the simple surfaces, which is both Kaurismäki’s aesthetic mantra and his great theme. At their best, these quiet, cool films tear you to pieces. Fallen Leaves already feels like one of his signature works.
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