Fallen Leaves
The fact that any film is great let alone good is a small miracle. I say that movies for the most part are commercial first. They’re greenlit and budgeted based on the idea that they’ll generate more money than was spent to make them. That money comes from us who trek to the theater, brave the increasingly high ticket costs and increasingly rude audiences who seem more and more to think the entire theater is their own living room and behave accordingly. It’s a wild notion to go to the theater and be able to even focus on the piece of art you’ve chosen to watch thanks to the theater’s constant attempts to sell you things so they can stay afloat. And yet sometimes despite every distraction and economic demand on our wallets a film breaks through like the sun on a cloudy day to warm and nourish our souls. That’s the power of art. This feeling can stem from a film in any form and any genre. It just has to hit you right. In this case I was nourished by a simple Finnish movie about a woman wrongfully fired from her job, a stubborn drunk who sees he’s wasting his life, and a lovely yellow dog. This is Fallen Leaves.
Aki Kaurismaki is Finland’s most renowned director and Fallen Leaves marks his 20th outing but even if he’d just arrived on the scene with this, his most recent work, he’d be lauded for how great it is. Some of that greatness is born of the film’s simple plot: a middle-aged woman who lives alone in her small tidy apartment in Helsinki loses her job stocking food in a market when a security guard discovers that she’s hidden an expired prepackaged sandwich in her bag. She find another job as a dishwasher at a rundown bar - called California Bar which is perfect considering its drab exterior and slumped over barflies don’t convey any sunny disposition at all. As quickly as she gets this job she loses it when the owner of the bar is arrested for drug dealing, on payday of course. So without any money or luck she stands despondent outside California Bar when suddenly a man she recognizes but doesn’t know askes her out for coffee. He pays for the coffee but betrays the idea of being a guardian angel when he sneaks booze into his cup when she isn’t looking. He can’t get through his morning without it.
These two lonely people—we’ll later learn their names are Holappa and Ansa, and they’re played by Jussi Vatanen and Alma Pöysti—will embark on a shaky adventure undercut by misunderstandings, missed connections, and Holappa’s excessive drinking. They speak to one another in flattened sentences that are still, somehow, swollen with meaning. After coffee, Holappa asks Ansa if she’d like to go to the cinema. He chooses the movie—it’s The Dead Don’t Die, by Jim Jarmusch, and they sit solemnly side-by-side as Bill Murray and Adam Driver fend off a townful of zombies. Later, Holappa asks Ansa if she liked the film. “I did,” she says soberly. “I never laughed so much.” We never see her laugh.
This is the Kaurismaki way, a special kind of deadpan that makes his movies sing. You either respond to it or you don’t. I can understand people seeing Fallen Leaves or any of Kaurismaki’s other films, like the poker-faced existential comedy I Hired a Contract Killer, or the immigrant parable Le Havre—and shrugging, not thinking of them as such a big deal. But Kaurismaki works magic with understatement, especially in Fallen Leaves.
It’s there in his color schemes, the way he lights and composes the vision of these two people going about the business of their lives: In an early scene, Ansa reluctantly boards a bus after seeing Holappa (the two have not yet officially met) passed out at the bus stop, his pockets already having been riffled through by youthful hoodlums, disgruntled to have found nothing. She’d stopped to ask him if he was OK, but he remained sound asleep; you can see she felt powerless to help in her current situation. At home, when she turns on the radio, the news blaring out is terrible: these are reports from the war raging in Ukraine, urgent missives about bombed communities and dead children. Maybe this is Kaurismaki’s way of telling us that because there’s no real refuge from the world’s horrors, every tender connection we make with others matters that much more.
Kaurismaki has such deep affection for his characters—and chooses such quietly expressive actors to bring them to life—that he can never allow them to suffer for long. During a dinner date Ansa tells him that she’s lost family to alcoholism, and she cannot tolerate his drinking. He stomps off angrily, informing her that she can’t tell him what to do. But as he does so, he knows how much he’s losing. Weeks earlier, outside that movie theater, Ansa had kissed his cheek, and as she’d walked off into the night, he touched the side of his face as if to hold that whisper of a kiss there forever. Holappa, a metalworker, keeps losing jobs because of his drinking. Vatunen, sturdy as a beanpole, plays him as a man so hung up on keeping his dignity that he can’t see the world—or the promise of Ansa—slipping away from him. This is an oversight that Kaurismaki, with his generosity for these characters, will insist on putting right.
It's not giving too much away to tell you that these lonely lovers eventually connect. But before that happens, Ansa—it turns out that her name means “trapped” in Finnish—finds another kind of joy, by adopting a friendly street dog that has been wandering around near the factory where she works. (Great dogs are a hallmark of Kaurismaki’s movies.) She brings him home and bathes him. Everything about the moment is beautiful, including the color scheme: she wears a red blouse, the dog’s fur is soft and yellow, she’s rubbing him vigorously with a lavender towel. There’s joy to be found in color, in the companionship of animals, in love that’s hard won. Kaurismaki reopens our eyes to all these things, things we sometimes forget we know. He’s the patron saint of reminding; life’s miracle, he knows, is already right inside us.
