Fallen Leaves

FALLEN LEAVES   ***

Aki Kaurismäki

2023

IDEA:  Two blue-collar laborers find a budding connection with each other amid the doldrums of their lives.

BLURB:  Cut from the same cloth as Bresson, Jarmusch, and Roy Andersson, Aki Kaurismäki operates in a mode of deadpan, laconic anti-naturalism that generates its own all-encompassing affective universe. It’s a drab, mostly unforgiving world through which the characters lumber like zombies, numbed to the routines of modern wage labor and well-ensconced in the warm, dark arms of disillusionment. Kaurismäki makes you feel the weight of the world on Ansa and Holappa, setting their lethargic movements in shadowy, noir-ish interiors and on frigid gray streets that seem equally suffocating. Yet Fallen Leaves never lapses into miserabilism. Kaurismäki’s characters may be down-on-their-luck working drudges living in spartan quarters with a single set of dinnerware, but they also have brute stoicism, which Kaurismäki and his actors carefully and unsentimentally wield in the form of droll impassivity. Ansa and Holappa also have empathy, a buried light that Fallen Leaves gently teases out from its pallid Helsinki cityscape. Their bumpy but eventually redemptive courtship has the sweet simplicity of a silent movie, particularly a Chaplin, who is not-incidentally named in the film’s pithy punchline. Popular culture frames Ansa and Holappa’s romance throughout, from classic movie posters to the diegetic songs that seem to perfectly narrate their emotions. They simultaneously serve as escapes and grounding mechanisms, ways of finding oneself in - and back to - a world that often feels so distant.