Fallen Leaves

Film Notes

Another two lost souls attempt to find love in Aki Kaurismäki’s Helsinki-set Competition drama.

Don’t expect radical novelty from Fallen Leaves: the latest from the eternally doleful Aki Kaurismäki is altogether business as usual. For years, Kaurismäki’s films have offered a series of tender, meticulously crafted variations on a similar theme and, while this one isn’t perhaps quite prime vintage, anyone who loves his paradoxically joyous melancholia – cinema that is, let’s say, happy on the inside – will take this one to heart. While Fallen Leaves, which won the Jury prize at Cannes, may not inspire a new surge of fans, international prospects are solid as ever for a film-maker with one of the most faithful followings in the auteur world.

Kaurismäki has announced this as a hitherto-lost fourth chapter to his early ‘working class trilogy’ (Shadows in Paradise, Ariel, The Match Factory Girl). In fact, thematically and stylistically it has just as much in common with anything he has made since 1996’s Drifting Clouds – and as the similar title might suggest, his new hard-times love story is very much of a piece with that film. It’s about two lonely Helsinki people who notice each other one night, exchanging shy glances in a karaoke club, then meet by chance and cautiously click, only to endure the storms of fate and socio-economic trouble.

Ansa (Alma Pöysti) is a supermarket worker who is fired after being caught taking home food past its sell-by date that is otherwise destined for the dustbin. Metalworker Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) also loses his job – and his bed in a workers’ hostel – after being caught tippling on the job. He’s depressed because he drinks and drinks because he’s depressed, as he tells similarly laconic co-worker (and would-be baritone singing star) Huotari, played by Janne Hyytiäinen from Kaurismäki’s Lights in the Dusk).

Ansa and Holappa meet after she loses her next job, at a run-down drinking den, and they decide to go to a film together – The Dead Don’t Die, by Kaurismäki’s long-time kindred spirit Jim Jarmusch. She writes down her phone number, but not her name – and Holappa promptly loses the piece of paper. The way the couple are framed on the way out of the cinema, against a poster for Brief Encounter, should perhaps warn us that the course of love won’t run smooth here; but then, despite his and his characters’ signature glumness, Kaurismäki has always been something of an optimist, especially where love is concerned.

At heart, Kaurismäki’s films have always been a bit like dramatised country and western songs – resilient working-class folk perennially stiffed by The Man and yearning for love, while shedding the odd tear into their beer (or vodka). But, in his last few films, Kaurismäki has also tended to signal the seriousness of his social and political conscience, with a running string here of radio broadcasts about the war in Ukraine.

Fallen Leaves is a beautifully acted film. Tersely amused tenderness flickering over her usually still features, Alma Pöysti (best known as the lead of Zaida Bergroth’s Tove) steps with poise into the shoes of former Kaurismäki female lead Kati Outinen, coming across as a full-blown romantic heroine despite the drably unflattering raincoat she wears through much of the film. Prominent Finnish TV and cinema regular Jussi Vatanen is similarly fine as the shy working guy, and has a terrific deadpan buddy act with Hyytiäinen, with their immaculately slow-burn exchanges of one-liners: “Tough guys don’t sing.” Pause. “You’re not a tough guy.”

The director’s characteristic heightened colour schemes and composed play with shadows and light give Fallen Leaves – shot as ever by Timo Salminen – that distinctive look of a fictional world sealed in on itself, yet carrying recognisable elements of the real Helsinki. The soundtrack is perhaps Kaurismäki’s most diverse to date, with a bizarrely eclectic karaoke session featuring hard rock, stately Finnish tango and a Schubert serenade.

Fallen leaves do indeed appear, in a lovely autumnal montage, but no less liberally scattered are the vintage movie posters seen throughout, with Kaurismäki as ever paying tribute to the great names – Ozu, Bresson and Chaplin only being the most obvious. Kaurismäki fans will note a fleeting cameo by long-term regular Sakari Kuosmanen and can be assured that sooner or later, the latest of a long line of lugubriously lovable screen dogs will get a look in. Fallen Leaves may not set the film world on fire, but is guaranteed to cast a warm glow.

 Jonathan Romney, Screen Daily, 22nd May 2023.

Fallen Leaves: Kaurismäki returns with a bittersweet cinephile romance.

Love represents the possibility of transcending – or at least surviving – the grinding reality of life under capitalism in Fallen Leaves, Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki’s fourth addition to his ‘Proletariat’ film series.

More than three decades have passed since Aki Kaurismäki’s so-called Proletariat Trilogy – comprising Shadows in Paradise (1986), Ariel (1988) and The Match Factory Girl (1990) – but not much has changed. In Fallen Leaves, announced ahead of its Cannes premiere as a fourth instalment in the series, the world is still various shades of grey and teal, livened up by the occasional splash of vivid colour: a woman’s bright red blazer, a dumpster of deep blue. Lonely men and women still toil away their days at dreary and precarious working-class jobs. After clocking off, they still go to bars where they drink and smoke and talk to each other in comically clipped sentences. If they talk at all, that is, as most of the time they prefer to stare solemnly ahead, letting their cigarettes smoulder while rock’n’roll plays on the jukebox or someone performs a wholly unlikely karaoke song, like Schubert’s ‘Serenade’.

Even the radios are vintage analogue models, though there’s no mistaking that it’s the present day, because all they seem to broadcast is news of Russian air strikes on Ukraine. If that’s the only thing new, perhaps Kaurismäki’s characteristic nostalgia isn’t unfounded. In any case, it also has its narrative advantages: when Ansa (Alma Pöysti) gives Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) her phone number, had she typed it into his mobile instead of writing it down on a piece of paper, the wind couldn’t have blown it away. And then the film couldn’t have indulged in a charming sequence of old-school romanticism, showing the forlorn Holappa return evening after evening to the cinema where they watched The Dead Don’t Die (2019) – the clips of the zombie comedy make for a droll contrast in style that doubles as a homage to Kaurismäki’s friend and fellow nostalgist Jim Jarmusch – in the hopes of running into her again.

In the cinema lobby hangs a large poster of Robert Bresson’s L’Argent (1983) and after watching The Dead Don’t Die, someone exclaims, “It reminded me of Diary of a Country Priest (1951)!” Absurd comparison notwithstanding, Kaurismäki is an avowed disciple of Bresson and shares with him a capacity to imbue gestures with tremendous emotional power. When Holappa first meets Ansa, who has just lost two jobs in as many days, his every small act of kindness, whether it’s buying her a cinnamon roll or inviting her to see a movie, is profoundly moving. Her kiss on his cheek before parting registers like a triumphant affirmation of hope and it’s tragic when he then loses her phone number right away. But Fallen Leaves doesn’t share the grim fatalism of The Match Factory Girl and, after Holappa spends several evenings littering the pavement in front of the cinema with anxiety-ridden cigarette butts, Ansa does finally walk past.

As in all of Kaurismäki’s Proletariat films, love represents the characters’ sole possibility of transcending – or at least surviving – the grinding reality of life under capitalism. Ansa and Holappa both recognise their salvation in the other and although their relationship is sweeter and more immediately loving than those of their predecessors, it’s imperilled by Holappa’s drinking habit. He is the kind of alcoholic who hides bottles of booze at work, despite operating heavy machinery, and sneaks swigs from a hip flask whenever others turn their back. “I drink too much because I’m depressed, and I’m depressed because I drink too much,” he tells a friend. When he refuses to get on the wagon for Ansa, who already lost her father and her brother to alcohol, she leaves him. It will take a few more tragedies before he calls her to say that he is “as sober as a desert rat” and ask if she’ll take him back.

At the Berlinale in 2017, when Kaurismäki premiered The Other Side of Hope, he claimed it would be his last film. Of course, directors ranging from Steven Soderbergh to Tsai Ming-liang have announced their retirements only to go back on their word in an even shorter time span. In the case of Soderbergh and Tsai, however, their return was motivated by a desire to venture into new territory, be it thematically or stylistically. The same can’t be said for Fallen Leaves. As pleasurable as it is to revisit Kaurismäki’s distinctive vision of the world and the troubled humans who inhabit it – and at 81 minutes, the film is certainly short and sweet – one is left with the feeling of having seen it all before.  

 Giovanni Marchini Camia. Sight and Sound, 24th May 2023.

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