Fallen Leaves‘ Dry Rom-Com Finds Connection Amid the Chaos
Financial insecurity can feel like a seesaw, your weight uncomfortably shifting from grounded realizations of your plight to floating unrealities you see from outside yourself. One second you’re realizing exactly how many meals your bare shelves need to last you, the next you’re realizing that hours—days—have passed you by as you go through the only motions available to you. The numbing whiplash of routine deadens your senses. The steady hydraulic pressure stifles your plan to escape, but can never fully crush it. Unfair and even cruel at times, there is always enough space for hope underneath the monotonous demands of poverty. It’s here that Fallen Leaves allows fate and desire to join forces, linking these rare moments of freedom between two disheartened blue-collar souls. Bone-dry yet filled with yearning, Aki Kaurismäki’s Finnish rom-com is a charming tale of persistence amid chaos.
Kaurismäki positions Fallen Leaves out of time and space, where anachronisms of culture and technology contribute to a just-off Helsinki that can drift between dreams and nightmares. The melodramatic plot machinations only enhance the feeling that you’re sleepwalking through the film, which could turn any second from charming Twin Peaks-like musical moments of karaoke to grounded, crushing news reports of Russian troops closing in on Ukraine. Either way its tonal wind blows, we—and its characters—are powerless to stop it. But they are also powerless in the face of love, even if it’s as brittle as a pile of autumn leaves.
Alma Pöysti’s Ansa and Jussi Vatanen’s Holappa (though both go unnamed at times, to both us and each other) scrape the kind of lives by where anonymity and distance come with the weekly paycheck. They are nobodies to their employers, and the persistent disrespect has colored their loneliness. Holappa copes with booze; Ansa with a minor bit of shoplifting. Neither can keep their vices from bleeding into the workplace. Both have the kind of larger-than-life aspirations embodied by ballads and the cinema. They’re stuck, but Jim Jarmusch, Charlie Chaplin and the expressionless duo Maustetytöt are extending their hands.
Briefly brushing across each other’s path one night out after work—and with the assistance of Holappa’s coworker buddy, played with a handsome, punchline-happy heft by Janne Hyytiäinen—a glance turns into more. A flirtation. A date. A possibility. A fairy tale.