It’s hard to imagine the Finnish Tourist Board having an amicable relationship with its country’s most famous filmmaker. Aki Kaurismäki’s Helsinki is filled with dusty factories, sparse dive bars named after faraway cities, and grungy movie theatres with impressive collections of classic film posters. No northern lights, no saunas, and not a Moomin to be found in this drab urban landscape filled with a stoic populace whose bone-dry temperament might be best described as pragmatic fatalism. Kaurismäki has been sending these modestly budgeted dispatches from Finland since his 1989 international breakout success, Leningrad Cowboys Go America. Stories filled with love and loneliness, revenge and despair. Stories that blend Buster Keaton, classic Hollywood, and a wicked, deadpan wit, centered around a listless working class. Massively influential, he is often imitated, but never duplicated. After his last film, 2017’s The Other Side of Hope, was released, he said that he was retiring. But everyone says that these days, don’t they?
Fallen Leaves (Kuolleet lehdet) begins with Ansa (Pöysti), a grocery store clerk who lives alone in a modest apartment. She leads a simple life of monotonous routine, which is broken one day by the grocery security guard, who has been eyeing her quite closely as she takes expired items home and lets customers take products bound for the dumpster. She is fired. And here is Holappa (Vatanen), a factory worker who lives with his co-workers in a trailer. He also leads a simple life of monotonous routine, which is broken one night when his workmate, Huotari (Hyytiäinen), convinces him to go to a bar for karaoke. Ansa happens to be there with her friends, and as Huotari flirts with one of her companions, Holappa and Ansa exchange glances, a spark of interest. Thus their romance begins in fits and starts, Kaurismäki orchestrating coincidences and near misses with his typical sardonic élan. They meet for coffee, they go to the movies (Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die, because of course), but when Ansa realizes her suitor is a drunkard (Holappa hits the bottle with enough frequency to get him fired from two jobs during the film) a decision must be made. It’s either Ansa or alcohol.
One of the many charms of Kaurismäki’s films is the way he fuses the impassive emotions he’s subtly evoking with his characters with his absurd, hilarious signaling of the form of filmmaking itself. The way a lost piece of paper skitters down the sidewalk, or how the titular leaves, in a critical scene, seem to be haphazardly tossed into frame by a production assistant. It’s the stilted comportment of the actors at the start of any given scene, where you can almost hear the director yelling for action, and it’s Kaurismäki randomly introducing a cute dog in the third act, because, well, don’t good movies have cute dogs in them now? It’s his effortless ability to shape a universe with this outlook, one with its own natural laws and behaviors, but here the creator is a sly skeptic, a prankster with a penchant for old-school R&B and downtrodden losers, whose heart retains a sliver of compassion for humanity as they bumble about his brutalist sets searching for meaning or ignoring it entirely. I can see the promotional materials already.
This article appears in December 1 • 2023.