Fallen Leaves: Kaurismäki's most hopeful, honest romance

Six years after the release of his supposed “final film,” The Other Side of Hope, Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismäki returns with Fallen Leaves: an understated romance set in a dour Helsinki, against a contemporary backdrop of poverty, uncertainty, and war abroad. It is also one of the funniest and most charming films of the year. For Kaurismäki this is not a contradiction in tone, but is central to the universe of his films in which people are forced to carve out pockets of meaning for themselves in an absurdly funny and cruel world. In Fallen Leaves we see the director at his most hopeful and romantic. 

 The romance in question is between two typical Kaurismäki-esque losers, members of the working poor attempting to better their lives while surrounded by scoundrels, drug dealers, and overbearing bosses. We watch as they cycle through a succession of underpaying jobs, either being fired or, in one case, their boss being arrested on payday (before he can pay, naturally). Their love, at least in the beginning, is not about passion, but instead operates according to the rules of star-crossed inevitability, a duty that they must fulfill only because every other area of their life has been a disappointment or failure. It’s certainly not cinematic romance as depicted in, say, Four Weddings and A Funeral, or a Douglas Sirk melodrama, but it is nonetheless vital in its necessity for our two desperate wanderers, and is perhaps more honest in that regard. 

 We first meet Ansa (Alma Pöysti), who stocks a grocery store before being spotted by a security guard who sees her pocketing expired food and who, upon her firing, simply states, “I was just following orders.” Her counterpart is a man named Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), a laborer who falls in and out of jobs due to his alcoholism. We watch the characters as they work their jobs, go to the bar every night, transit across the dark city, and occasionally eat a disappointing dinner alone. Kaurismäki places us into the grooves of their lives, the paths they walk every day, the only thing to look forward to being the next drink or professional disaster. 

 Ansa and Holappa’s romance is set off by a sequence of by chance meet cutes, first spotting each other at a karaoke night at a local dive bar. Then by chance on the street, where he takes her to get coffee and they see a movie together. As they depart, they make plans to see each other again, she gives him her number but not her name; “next time,” she says. The number flies out of Holappa’s pocket. This sets off a string of near misses, disastrous dates, and a love that begins to grow between our characters as they stand on the threshold of some kind of companionship but yet have to choose whether or not to cross into it. 

 What makes Fallen Leaves special is Karismaki’s focus on expression, or lack thereof. He instructs his actors to not worry too much about lines, to get the shot in one or two takes. This lends his characters a demure quality, they speak in matter-of-fact statements and give away little in their faces. Yet his characters speak through their actions, what they do or do not do, how they pursue their desires and make changes in their lives. The character’s desperate struggle for companionship is set against Karismaki’s Helsinki, a dark, industrial, and often anachronistic locale populated by dive bars with names like “California Pub.” His cinematography is accordingly sparse, camera movement is scant, but in his compositions he is exacting about where he places his actors to accentuate their emotional distance from one another. 

 As idiosyncratic as Kaurismäki’s visuals and world might be Fallen Leaves imports elements from our contemporary reality. In an early shot we see a poster advertising a “Rebellion for Nature” event, and throughout the film Ansa’s radio plays news reports about the Russian assault on the Ukrainian city of Mariupol. There is an argument to be made for the politics of Kaurismäki’s films, given away by his focus on the lives of people living on the margins, criminals, the poor, immigrants trying to make their way in a new country. Yet it is rare that he lets the “real” world intrude so overtly into his films. It is hard to argue against the idea that we are living in times of exceptional brutality, fear, and poverty. But perhaps Kaurismäki makes a case for something which, while not offering transcendence from this world, at the very least allows us the opportunity to work towards something; companionship, and even, if we are miraculously lucky, love.