Fallen Leaves (Kuolleet Lehdet), the fourth volume in Aki Kaurismäki’s working class series, sees Two lonely souls (Alma Pöysti and Jussi Vatanen) searching for the love of their lives.Supplied
Fallen Leaves
Written and directed by Aki Kaurismaki
Starring Alma Poysti and Jussi Vatanen
Classification PG; 81 minutes
Opens in select theatres Nov. 24, including the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto
Critic’s Pick
Having never visited, it’s difficult to tell whether Helsinki is as dour a destination as Aki Kaurismaki makes it out to be. Across two sets of cinematic series (the Proletariat and Finland trilogies), the Finnish filmmaker has depicted a metropolis that is 50 diminishing shades of grey, all lonely slabs of concrete, peeling paint, and dead air – a city as a tomb. Or, as my wife put it the other night while watching Kaurismaki’s latest Helsinki fable, Fallen Leaves, his aesthetic is “like Wes Anderson, without all the stuff.”
But while Kaurismaki holds little space in his heart for Helsinki, he reserves more than enough room for his characters. Working-class heroes just barely clinging onto existence and each other, these are Kaurismaki’s people. The day that the director makes a film in which all hope is lost – in which romantic yearnings are actually trumped by gloomy environs – is the day that Helsinki freezes over.
Take the case of Fallen Leaves, which focuses on Ansa (Alma Poysti) and Holappa (Jussi Vatanen). She works at a supermarket, stocking shelves and keeping her head down, until she’s busted for taking home an expired bagel. He works in construction, never far from his flask. Their home lives are distressingly spare – she occupies a one-room apartment whose sole luxury is an ancient radio, he shares a work site trailer with three other men – and there doesn’t seem to be much possibility or even desire for change. But one night while enduring karaoke at Helsinki’s very worst (or possibly best?) bar, the two lock eyes – sizing each other up more than falling head over heels – and suddenly there’s the promise of a better tomorrow.
There are complications, of course, including one missed-connection moment that feels so manufactured that it can only be Kaurismaki satirizing a romcom trope. But like much of the director’s work, Fallen Leaves is more comedy than tragedy, even if it delivers its jokes with the straightest of deadpan faces.
Your mileage may vary, but there may not be a better sight gag in all of 2023 cinema than the scene in which Ansa and Holappa, on a movie date, sit stone-faced while watching Adam Driver blow away a zombie in Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die. A runner-up moment, though, might be when Kaurismaki pauses his film’s story to focus on a live performance by the Finnish pop duo Maustetytöt, who sing “I’m a prisoner here forever / Even the graveyard is by fences bound.”
These moments of, let’s call them levity, help pave the way for what’s ultimately a beautiful tribute to the power of resilience. As Ansa (which Google tells me is Finnish for “trapped”) and Holappa each lose a series of jobs only to pick themselves right back up, Fallen Leaves delivers on the promise of its title: This is a crisp autumn breeze of a movie, refreshing and invigorating even when it seems like things are falling apart.