Fallen Leaves
The deadpan Finnish minimalist Aki Kaurismäki is back with another bittersweet tale of hardscrabble lives in his retro vision of Helsinki
A stuttering romance and the daily travails of the downtrodden working class provide the material for Fallen Leaves, the brief and beguiling new film from Finnish master Aki Kaurismäki. In the late 1980s, the director made what is generally referred to as his Proletariat Trilogy, comprising Shadows in Paradise (1986), Ariel (1988) and The Match Factory Girl (1990). A triptych about hardscrabble lives, it featured factory workers, coal miners, meter maids and refuse collectors in a series of tragicomedies suffused with dour beauty and wry humour. This new film is effectively a fourth entry into the series, as two lonesome souls seek connection in Kaurismäki’s idiosyncratic realisation of Helsinki.
Ansa (Alma Pöysti) and Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) first encounter one another when their eyes meet across their local bar during karaoke night. They are both with friends and while Holappa’s buddy Huotari (Janne Hyytiäinen) tries his luck with Ansa’s pal Liisa (Nuusa Koivu), our protagonists only share a glance before going their separate ways. The path to true love – or indeed, any kind of companionship – ne’er did run smooth and while the delivery might be resolutely deadpan, the narrative is more reminiscent of farce. When chance does throw them together for a date, they don’t exchange names, so when Holappa subsequently loses Ansa’s phone number, he has no reasonable way of tracking her down.
Both protagonists also lose their jobs more than once across the course of the film – the precarity of the low-paid casual worker. Ansa is first fired by the supermarket she works at after she’s caught taking an out-of-date sandwich home; her subsequent gig at a local bar comes to an end when the manager is arrested for dealing drugs. For Holappa, alcohol is the problem: the bottle stashed in his locker, the other one stashed around the work yard, the flask in his breast pocket. Even when he and Ansa do find one another again, his passion for the drink will become a sticking point.
Fallen Leaves takes place in the now recognisable locale of Kaurismäki’s inimitable world. It has a shabby rockabilly aesthetic that might serve as period detail were it not for the overt contemporary particulars that inhabit it. The chunky kitchen radio that Ansa listens to may suggest the mid-20th century, but its constant updates from the Russian invasion of Ukraine root the drama firmly in the present. Instead, Kaurismäki’s milieu is one of anachronism – in the form of fashion and décor, but also in the longueurs of its protagonists which seem to reflect the classic movie posters that often litter the walls behind them. This lends a poignancy to the laconic dialogue, where even the most barbed exchanges and mute anxiety leave gaps to be filled with unspoken emotion.
Perhaps what is most gratifying about Kaurismäki’s work is the way that he is able to balance his po-faced ironic tone with a genuine, and acutely tender, melancholy. It is an equilibrium he has honed over years and while few would argue that Fallen Leaves strikes new ground, it is a thoroughly rewarding return to his distinctive universe.
Released 1 Dec by MUBI; certificate 12A