Fallen Leaves
Kuolleet lehdet
Aki Kaurismäki (2023)
Ansa (Alma Pöysti), fortyish, lives alone in present-day Helsinki. She has a zero-hour contract stacking supermarket shelves and chucking away food that’s past its sell-by date. Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), also in his forties and unattached, does building work. He’s an alcoholic who can’t hold down a job for long. Ansa loses hers, too: Fallen Leaves isn’t very old before she lets a derelict man have one expired product and takes another home to microwave. The supermarket’s alarmingly vigilant security guard (Mikko Mykkänen) reports her. Her boss (Martti Suosalo) deplores Ansa’s rule-breaking; the guard insists that ‘I was only doing my job’; she’s fired on the spot.
The protagonists’ paths first cross in a bar, where Ansa goes with her friend, Liisa (Nuppu Koivu); Holappa has been dragged along there by Huotari (Janne Hyytiäinen), the closest he’s got to a friend. It’s karaoke night – a chance for Huotari to perform and, he hopes, appeal to a woman. While he’s failing to impress Liisa, Ansa and Holappa get talking and agree to see a film together. After that first date, she invites him round for a meal and writes her address on a scrap of paper. When he asks her name she says she’ll tell him next time they meet. On his way home, Holappa, taking a packet of cigarettes from his pocket, inadvertently dislodges the scrap of paper, which blows away. The following evening, Ansa, who has bought a second plate and extra cutlery for Holappa’s use, waits in vain for her guest to arrive. They meet again when Holappa hangs around the cinema one night. We can guess how long he’s been hanging around from the pile of fag ends beside him in the street.
Aki Kaurismäki’s two previous films, Le Havre (2011) and The Other Side of Hope (2017), were both concerned with the experience of refugees (Gabonese and Syrian respectively) in Western Europe (France and Finland respectively). This latest piece focuses on characters that, as far as we can tell, have lived in Finland all their lives. It must be said we can’t tell very far. An earlier Kaurismäki film (the only one of his that I’d seen before Le Havre and The Other Side of Hope) was The Man Without a Past (2002) – a condition that applies to nearly all the characters in Fallen Leaves. Kaurismäki supplies no information on Holappa’s background. We learn that Ansa’s small house was inherited from her godmother; and that her father and brother died as a result of alcohol addiction. She tells Holappa that when he eventually makes it round to her place for dinner. Since it’s clear where his priorities lie – he enjoys the simple food less than he regrets the paucity of booze on offer – it seems that Ansa and Holappa are, as a couple, also without a future.
They go their separate ways temporarily: Ansa starts grim-looking manual work in a factory; Holappa gets another building site job, which he also loses after drinking on it. Staying in a hostel, he decides to kick his habit. He smartens himself up and heads round to Ansa’s; when he moves out of the frame, a screech of brakes is enough to tell us that he doesn’t reach his destination. Ansa, meanwhile, has adopted a waif and stray in canine form, an evidently elderly dog called Chaplin. She learns from Huotari that Holappa was hit by a train and is in a coma. She visits him in hospital and visits him again. He eventually recovers consciousness, though his first question is, ‘Am I dead?’ In the film’s closing scene, Ansa, Holappa and the dog walk off – walk home, it seems – together.
Kaurismäki’s films are never long but Fallen Leaves, at eighty-one minutes, is unusually short. That still leaves plenty of time for the writer-director to remind us of his trademark pessimism, deadpan humour and love of cinema. The last of these, more prominent in Le Havre than in The Other Side of Hope, is even more salient here. The film that Ansa and Holappa see together is the absurdist zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die, by Jim Jarmusch, whose work has often been compared to Kaurismäki’s. Leaving the screening, Ansa tells Holappa, with no hint of a smile, ‘I’ve never laughed so much’. The cinema is also showing, among other things, Brief Encounter but movie references aren’t confined to this obvious location. As well as Chaplin, there’s a poster for Rocco and His Brothers on a wall of the karaoke bar. In one instance, Kaurismäki seems to be lampooning pretentious cinema-going: two vaguely pompous middle-aged men emerging from The Dead Don’t Die discuss whether it was more Bressonian than Godardian. This, according to Philip Concannon’s Sight and Sound (December 2023) review, is ‘one of the film’s funniest [gags]’ and it certainly got a laugh in NFT2. The trouble is, whenever a film-maker pokes fun at cinephile culture, plenty of those who partake in it will congratulate themselves on getting the joke. The film’s deadpan humour, visual and verbal, is often more satisfying. Receiving Ansa’s address for the second time, Holappa carefully places the paper on which it’s written in his jacket pocket and, after a nicely-timed pause, zips the pocket for good measure. When Ansa visits the hospital, a nurse (Maria Heiskanen) suggests that she read to Holappa as this may help bring him round. Ansa dutifully picks up a magazine and regales the patient with the story of a student who cannibalised his girlfriend.
Pessimism isn’t in short supply in Fallen Leaves. The supermarket powers-that-be are only the start. Each time Ansa turns on the radio, there’s the latest news of the war in Ukraine. Geography makes this an especially troubling subject for Finns – an intractable one, too: Ansa eventually exclaims, ‘This bloody war!’ and stops listening to the radio. Holappa’s accident, just when he’s trying to sort himself out, might seem to sum up Kaurismäki’s bleak outlook: life as a bad joke. As in this film’s two immediate predecessors, though, he likes his main characters too much to despair. There are times when Kaurismäki seems almost to be arguing with himself about this – a big part of what makes Fallen Leaves so increasingly likeable. Distinctively likeable, too, because, although the tone of his film-making seems far removed from romantic comedy, Kaurismäki has things play out here using a rom-com envelope – even beyond Ansa and Holappa. While Liisa continues to be amused by Huotari’s delusions of sexy youthfulness, the karaoke king’s romantic persistence is eventually, if tentatively, rewarded.
Another big part of the success of Fallen Leaves is the excellent lead actors. Although Zaida Bergroth’s Tove (2020) was frustrating, Alma Pöysti often impressed in the title role. Kaurismäki’s approach dictates that Pöysti shows a narrower range here but her understated acting is still nuanced and emotionally powerful. She’s splendidly partnered by Jussi Vartanen, whom I’d seen before only in the Finnish television drama Man in Room 301 (2019). In Fallen Leaves, Vartanen is even more straight-faced than his co-star but he’s still expressive, and has a hangdog charm. Chaplin (real name Alma) does good work, too, even if it’s no surprise that s/he lost out in the Palm Dog category at this year’s Cannes (where Fallen Leaves won the Jury Prize) to the dog in Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall. As in Le Havre and The Other Side of Hope, Kaurismäki’s choice of music also contributes very positively. Besides the karaoke in the bar, there’s a terrific song performed there by a female group (I haven’t found out what it is): the contrast between its dynamic music and weltschmerz-heavy lyrics give the number a real charge. The film’s Finnish title translates literally as ‘Dead Leaves’ and the French standard ‘Les feuilles mortes’ is the closing song on the soundtrack. The Anglophone world knows the song as ‘Autumn Leaves’; the less starkly gloomy register of its English title reflects pretty well the closing mood of Aki Kaurismäki’s film.
1 December 2023