Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki signalled several years ago that The Other Side of Hope, for which he won the Berlin Film Festival’s Best Director honour, would be his final movie. It’s quite a statement for a successful acclaimed director to announce their retirement, and often it doesn’t seem to last. I think we’re coming up on Quentin Tarantino’s third last movie ever, we just got Hayao Miyazaki’s fourth or fifth, and sure enough Kaurismäki is back as well -but not with anything as grand or ambitious as those. As befitting the working-class focus of his career, his reappearance is with a humble, briskly-paced little love story about two poor but spirited souls in Helsinki. Fallen Leaves is one of the most immediately likeable movies I’ve seen in quite some time.
In its sweet romantic simplicity against a backdrop of casual European city life, it reminds me a touch of Mia Hansen-Løve’s One Fine Morning from last year, only with very different and dour circumstances for its leading figures: a contractually exploited grocery store employee Ansa (Alma Pöysti), and an alcoholic scrapyard labourer Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), both highly dissatisfied in their work but (at least in Ansa’s case) not subsumed in a miasma of melancholy. Around them the world seems dark -it’s 2021 and via several radio reports we know it is early into the Russian invasion of Ukraine; anxiety over a potential war coming to their borders is communicated deftly, it feels like the eve of World War II. And yet hope for love persists.
In spite of these contexts, the movie isn’t really grim or depressing at all, much as you feel sympathy for the situations of both protagonists. There’s more an offbeat quirky sensibility to their lives and relationship. They are both somewhat stoic and quiet -meeting at a karaoke bar where Holappa’s middle-aged friend with misguided aspirations to be a singer performs the most dim rendition of an old Finnish standard. And there seems to be no outward emotionality at all from them, even when she checks on him later passed out at a bus stop and at their subsequent actual date to a movie. The movie is, of all things, Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die, and that should give some indication as to the method behind these personalities. Jarmusch and Kaurismäki have long been admirers of one another -Jarmusch even appeared in Kaurismäki’s Leningrad Cowboys Go America in 1994. And they clearly have a compatible style of humour, regardless of the mild criticism expressed for The Dead Don’t Die. These characters aren’t deadpan necessarily, but there’s a subtle comedy to their lack of overt emotionality. Certainly their personal circumstances aren’t ideal -there’s a twinge of depression there- but it’s engaged in a graceful dance with a mild-mannered sensitivity, and of course a helping of romantic curiosity.
Pöysti and Vatanen play it incredibly well, this often shy and silent attraction that in lieu of their despondent prospects is quite adorable. These are characters not defined by their words, and so there is a lot of subtlety required in the actors’ mannerisms that both these veterans deliver on tremendously. There is a gasp of life in his weary face when looking at her while she has the most lovely bittersweet half-smile when thinking of him. Pöysti especially communicates so much through so little, from Ansa’s bashful charm with Holappa to her sympathy over his issues and her stern boundaries around his alcoholism. Through this minimalist performance she even relays some playfulness, with her dog and a little bit with Holappa.
The relationship itself is precisely underplayed in ways that ground the characters and make them easy surrogates. Though not practical there is a cute pureness to how they don’t learn each other’s names until the end -even as this creates problems for them keeping in touch. And their dates themselves are so quaint. The quiet attentiveness and comfort of the movie they go to (at a rep theatre that is also playing, among other things, Godard’s Pierrot le Fou). Their dinner together at her apartment after very nearly losing touch -an inauspicious meal at a small table that only barely suits the two of them- and a still moment of them on the couch listening together to the radio, every time more news out of besieged Ukraine. The tension between them is not at all sexual, but it is entirely romantic as they both, though Holappa especially, show some eager anxiety in their scenes together. And there are a few places where Kaurismäki could call on some heavy emotion, where some might deem it more appropriate; but the frustration or affection actually feels greater without.
For as grounded and harsh as so much of the movie is, all of it is shot with a very classical stylized ambience. Kaurismäki appears to be going for a very 1970s aesthetic to the films’ visual language, as the lighting contrasts and cinematography, especially in the focus reserved for faces, seems to really hearken back to that era -but not in any kind of a glamourous way. Rather it is a humanist technique, casting people in relation to their surroundings, emphasizing the details of their features in a romantic light and rendering them all the more tangible. Specifically in scenes like at the karaoke bar and in Ansa’s barren apartment, there is a dry look to everything but in a very warm way that feels honest and encourages a greater closeness to the characters. Kaurismäki has had a fluctuating relationship with digital cinematography, but for this movie it seems very clearly shot on film -these effects so loudly suggest true practical celluloid, and it does make a difference on how the movie comes across. For all of its humble attributes, its lower working-class figures and environments, its overcast dourness regarding both the world at large and the one in which these people move, it is never an ugly movie in the slightest.
Very nearly, Fallen Leaves comes to a tragic end -but as is its pattern, grim melancholy is undercut by both sweetness and a little humour. It took till then to occur to me how Holappa has something of a Charlie Chaplin Tramp quality to him -and the ending almost feels adjacent to City Lights. There’s something really lovely in how the film pulls itself out of its dismal contexts to be genuinely inspiring, and does so without using any of the familiar tools of romantic storytelling convention. Also, that it manages to do so in such a short span of time -the film is a refreshing eighty minutes in length. Like everything else about Fallen Leaves, it is unassuming; and yet there is an indelible charm pervading it, absent from so many a greater film.
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