Aki Kaurismäki tantalises us with Fallen Leaves (Kuolleet Lehdet). Is it going to be a Sleeping Beauty story about a princess saved by a kiss? Or is it the more downbeat but emotion-choked tale of two ships that pass in the night, a Finnish Brief Encounter?
Kaurismäki references both, one way or another, as he spins out a typically deadpan, typically miserablist and typically gripping story of love among the “fallen leaves”, a pair of midlife McJobbers who could find happiness with each other if only they could connect up in the first place.
That’s his story. To tell it, two great actors. Alma Pöysti as Ansa, a supermarket worker who is fired early on and then takes a string of shitty jobs to keep her solitary life running smoothly. Jussi Vatanen as Holoppa, the serial loser she keeps bumping into, first at a karaoke evening with her friend, then paralytic drunk at a tram stop (him not her), before the two get into familiar boy-wins-girl-loses-girl positions, his excessive and relentless drinking being the hurdle that must be crossed.
The switcheroo is that she’s the handsome prince, he the damsel in distress. Possibly. It’s also possible that, invoking David Lean, Noel Coward, Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson – as Kaurismäki does with a shot featuring the poster to Brief Encounter (Lyhyt Onni, in Finnish) in the background – the two of them are going to meet and meet again but never actually get it on. It’s this that keeps us watching, along with the increasing sense that at a cosmic level these two people need each other.
“Don’t look into the camera, don’t rehearse and don’t read the script too much,” is how Pöysti described Kaurismäki’s instructions to her and Vatanen for playing their roles. “It’s all done in one take, so we can’t screw up.” They deliver the full Kaurismäki package – as if energy-saving were what movie-making is really all about.
As said, no smiles – well, maybe one and it lights up the screen. Instead a familiar procession of Kaurismäki deadpans in a Finland that is similarly bleak, and aged. There are so few young people in this film and so many old people, guys, mostly, sitting in bars not talking, just drinking themselves to a stupour. Kaurismäki repeatedly lets news from the Russia/Ukraine war percolate through – it turns out there are even grimmer parts of Europe – and repeatedly sets the action in bars with names from other parts of the world. The California Bar. The Buenos Aires Cafe Bar. Sunny, alternate realities where fairytales might come true. But what about right here right now?
Kaurismäki suffuses everything with a sorrowful, languid mood borrowed from old, sad Finnish pop tunes, or surging snatches of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 6, the one he finished just before he died. Kaurismäki regularly references movies in passing – in the bar where Holoppa and his drily funny friend Huotari (a flat, funny Janne Hyytiäinen) drink themselves stupid there’s a poster behind them of Alain Delon in Rocco and His Sisters. There are glancing, absurd references to both Bresson and Godard, as near as Kaurismäki is likely to come to set-up/pay-off comedy. Maybe that’s why Ansa’s dog is called Chaplin.
On their first date Holoppa and Ansa go to see a movie and it’s Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die. It’s funny in itself but it’s also a bit of reverse refrerencing – Jarmusch has long acknowledged the influence that Kaurismäki has had on his films, and even appeared in Kaurismäki’s Leningrad Cowboys Go America. His wayward affectless dramedies are the link between the austere dessicated humour of Kaurismäki and the more florid expression of the same by the Coen Brothers.
How many times have I used the word “dry” or alternatives in this review? For all that dehydrated (another one) top layer, beneath it this is a fertile, joyous film about two people who need and deserve love in a story that’s told in an absolutely straightforward way, Chaplin-style. A Hollywood movie, then. “We need love stories now,” said Kaurismäki in an interview when the film came out, as an antidote to “this bloody war”. And that’s what he’s delivered, a quite lovely one.
Fallen Leaves – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
