Fallen Leaves

Overview

A cast-out-of-time vibe tumbles and rustles through Fallen Leaves. In Aki Kaurismäki's 20th feature, his first since 2017's The Other Side of Hope, a calendar advises that it is 2024 and the radio reports on the war in Ukraine, but the look and mood could've been taken from decades and decades back. An account of two lonely souls in an uncaring world grasping a bond amid the grind that is just endeavouring to get by never dates, after all. Neither do the Finnish filmmaker's movies, with their love of droll humour, understatement and melancholy. Indeed, with tragicomedy Fallen Leaves, Kaurismäki links to the 80s and 90s, and to his Proletariat trilogy. Trust him to add a fourth title to the trio, which previously spanned 1986's Shadows in Paradise, 1988's Ariel and 1990's The Match Factory Girl; his love of absurdity doesn't age, either.

Ensuring that Helsinki resembles a relic of the past — even more so at California Bar, which throws back to America in the 60s — keeps a state of arrested development lingering in Fallen Leaves. What makes a place and its people feel as if moving forward is something that only happens elsewhere? In Kaurismäki's hands in a movie that's quintessentially a Kaurismäki movie from start to finish, the answer is as simple as being caught in a monotonous routine, the very reality that the writer/director's features also give audiences a reprieve from. He knows this. On-screen here, he has Holappa (Jussi Vatanen, Koskinen) and Ansa (Alma Pöysti, A Day and a Half) find solace in a cinema themselves. They don't see a Kaurismäki picture. Instead, they catch The Dead Don't Die by Jim Jarmusch, the closest person that he has to an American equivalent.

That's Holappa and Ansa's first official date, but not the start of Fallen Leaves' story. Before that, it gets to know him as a metalworker and her as a supermarket employee, methods of receiving a paycheque that neither is overly fussed about. Holappa is also an alcoholic, which eventually costs him his job. Ansa gets fired for trying to take home out-of-date food. The pair cross paths at a karaoke bar, and awkwardly, yet the audience can almost see the string tying them together as soon as they're both sharing a frame. For someone who so regularly processes the world's sadness through deadpan laughs, Kaurismäki isn't averse to kindred spirits — again, see his shoutout to Jarmusch, and also the fact that Fallen Leaves, as many of Kaurismäki's movies do, features a key canine connection.

Dialogue doesn't come easily or abundantly in a film by the creative force who clearly didn't retire after The Other Side of Hope, as he said he was going to — and who won the 2023 Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize with Fallen Leaves, the proof that he's still behind the camera. Understanding his characters by being in their presence has always been his approach. Valuing silence and pauses plays like a throwback, too, increasingly so when words being flung about incessantly at literal presses of buttons is life circa 2024. His casting, and also the cinematography that splashes Kaurismäki's movies across the screen, are always pivotal as a result. With Vatanen and Pöysti, the latter collecting a Golden Globe nomination, Fallen Leaves boasts actors who reside fully in Holappa and Ansa's skins and sorrows. With Timo Salminen doing the lensing, as he has since the director's first film four decades ago, Fallen Leaves also knows how to deeply observe everything that its stars bring to their on-screen figures.

The plot might be slight — Holappa and Ansa meet, gravitate towards each other, then attempt to clutch what respite they can from the winter that is existence — but that isn't the same as lacking detail. Seeing Ansa need to shop before she can host Holappa at her flat for dinner screams with minutiae about how accustomed she is to being alone, and for how long; she only has one place setting otherwise. While she's still stacking shelves for a gig, watching her employer demand that expired food be thrown out instead of going to those who need it says everything about the cruel corporate attitude that oppresses not just the working class, but 21st-century society at large. It isn't just that Kaurismäki wants his viewers to see Holappa and Ansa's lives, rather than hear them chat about it; to explain who they are, and why, plus the emotions simmering inside each, he also knows exactly what's crucial for audiences to peer at.

There's a sensation that springs from Kaurismäki's films: a feeling of stepping into a world so distinctively crafted by the filmmaker while also still spying a poignant reflection of reality. That's why his script for the graceful and gorgeous Fallen Leaves can chart such a familiar scenario — template-like, almost — and yet is anything but a by-the-numbers effort. He lets his characters be who they are, ups, downs, strengths, flaws and all. He perceives them and their plights with such evident empathy, and also with hope. Anyone watching can spot how they could be or have been Holappa and Ansa, including when Kaurismäki frequently finds the hilarity in this cycle that we all call life. Naturalistic, humane, wry, sincere, tender, taking the bad with the good when it comes to each and every day and person: that's his remit, winningly, warmly and meaningfully so.

In another of Fallen Leaves' touches that might seem at odds with setting it in 2024, pushing its protagonists together is complicated by the fact that they initially can't contact each other. Their names are hard-earned. Phone numbers are lost. This romance isn't easy to come by, then; for Holappa and Ansa both, and for viewers as well, it's worth striving for. Kaurismäki is a master at mirroring in his style, narrative and themes, such as showing how something that appears standard so rarely is via his plot and imagery, or telling a tale that takes away the always-on nature of modern life to stress what's truly important. He's a filmmaking great in general — and if the sexagenarian is encroaching upon the autumn of his career 41 years after his feature debut, his talents remain as verdant as ever.