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.
Their shared loneliness blossoms into familiarity, overcoming the practical obstacles of poverty (like the possession of a phone or a permanent address) and the over-the-top problems of romance movies with an intangible and imperfect sweetness. The only things that ground them are their constant lack of financial stability, the anxiety around the ongoing war, and the idea of each other. That could impose unwanted expectations upon these effective strangers, as prickly silences and defensive conversations confirm, but the deadpan deliveries and rough-around-the-edges lead turns make this fallibility relatable—even oddly winning. Expectation runs underneath Pöysti’s and Vatanen’s quiet performances, but so too does faith in one another.
Fallen Leaves doesn’t initially seem like an optimistic movie. Timo Salminen’s isolating, stagnant camera doesn’t dare to hope. Neither does Kaurismäki’s stiff script. Its characters’ black humor (particularly from the scene-stealing Hyytiäinen) scoffs at the idea. But hope is there in Fallen Leaves, at the edges and in the small moments. A stray dog’s love. A second set of flatware, purchased just to accommodate one date night. A shared ride on the seesaw, no longer as jarring with weight on both sides. Connections are still possible, even if you’ve fallen to the bottom.
Director: Aki Kaurismäki
Writer: Aki Kaurismäki
Starring: Alma Pöysti, Jussi Vatanen, Janne Hyytiäinen
Release Date: November 17, 2023
Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.
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