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The winner of this year’s Jury Prize at Cannes — the festival’s ostensible bronze medal — Kuolleet lehdet (or Fallen Leaves) is a gentle, uncanny love story from Finnish master Aki Kaurismäki. As witty and dry as his previous works, though perhaps more uplifting, the 81-minute Helsinki romance paints a portrait of loneliness that’s as enrapturing as it is tongue-in-cheek.
Focused on a pair of working-class lovers whose lives and circumstances keep getting in the way, it plays like an update to some of the early films that first put Kaurismäki on the map. With a pair of wry performances at its center, it also eschews the usual language of cinematic romance, creating emotional highs through stillness, silence, and subtle contrast, instead of overt formal flourishes.
If linguists ever coin an antonym for the movie musical, you’d find the poster for Fallen Leaves alongside it in the dictionary. And yet, it remains one the most surprisingly magnetic love stories you’re likely to experience this year.
What is Fallen Leaves about?
Credit: MUBI
The film may have a familiar destination, but it involves a wildly different journey from most traditional romantic comedies, and ends up more exuberant than its predecessors. Cheekily billed as the lost “fourth film” in Kaurismäki’s Proletariat Trilogy, after Shadows in Paradise (1986), Ariel (1988), and The Match Factory Girl (1990), it introduces us to a leading lady remarkably similar to that of the former: a lonely supermarket clerk named Ansa (Alma Pöysti).
Ansa is a name which can mean both “virtue” as well as “trapped.” The latter is a feeling Kaurismäki creates even before his first frames appear, when all we hear are the repetitive “beeps” of groceries being scanned — the most mundane musical score. Equally mundane is the sound of construction that introduces us to Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), an alcoholic day laborer who can’t muster much enthusiasm for his job, and seems to live for the weekend.
On a night out with their respective friends, surrounded by atrocious but deeply committed karaoke, Ansa and Holappa briefly cross paths, though it isn’t until their third chance encounter that they decide to go on a brief coffee date. This narrative delay imbues the film with the sense that fate might be working in mysterious ways, behind the scenes. However, the universe pulls them equally in the opposite direction. After a screening of Jim Jarmusch’s zombie film The Dead Don’t Die (a fittingly deadpan coda to Fallen Leaves), the duo not only fails to exchange names, but Holappa loses Ansa’s number as soon as she hands it to him Is it subconscious self-sabotage or simply bad luck? Who’s to say?
Aki Kaurismäki creates a bold aesthetic tapestry.
Credit: MUBI
Throughout Fallen Leaves, Kaurismäki gently carves visual poetry onto jagged surfaces, as though romance were something that existed apart from the lowly disappointments of daily life, if only by a hair’s distance.
Partway through, the characters watch a musical performance — with the same deadpan delivery as the rest of the film — of “Syntynyt suruun ja puettu pettymyksin” by an awkward Finnish pop duo named Maustetytöt, which means “Spice Girls.” The upbeat melody is complemented by hilariously depressing lyrics (subtitled as “I was born in sorrow and clothed in disappointment / I am a prisoner here forever”) which, like the specter of Jarmusch, is another fitting Rosetta stone. But this game of tonal opposites is more complex than it seems.
It’s easy enough to depict misery through a lack of color — look no further than Tom Ford’s A Single Man, in which each level is effectively modulated in order to set the mood — but Kaurismäki’s approach isn’t quite so straightforward. Shot mostly on 35mm film (with a few digital touches) by cinematographer Timo Salminen, the movie’s commitment to late ’80s and early ’90s realism extends to its palette, which pops with bright hues but weaves in and out of the characters’ lives in intriguing ways.
Holappa, for instance, conceals his showier shirts beneath dark jackets, as though he’s hiding any semblance of warmth he might radiate, even by accident. Ansa, meanwhile, sports a bright red top when she’s out and about, but it’s indistinguishable from her red uniform at the supermarket, as well as the fabric of her red couch, which she practically blends into. All her worlds, moods, and states of being seem to mesh together.
By keeping romance just out of reach, Kaurismäki magnifies the moments when the characters finally allow love (or rather, the mere possibility of no longer being alone) to seep in through the corners of the frame. For the most part, this hinges on its precise lead performances.
The dry performances in Fallen Leaves reveal hints of euphoria.
Credit: MUBI
There’s a running gag throughout Fallen Leaves — more droll than laugh-out-loud funny — wherein every time someone turns on the radio, the only tune blaring through it is news of Russia invading Ukraine (the film was shot in August 2022). Despite this specificity, the film’s setting isn’t typical of any time period in particular, and the characters don’t seem to have cellphones. However, the constant presence of harrowing news hovering in the background may as well be a social media feed to which they eventually grow numb.
It’s fitting, in an unfortunate way, that the film’s Nov. 17 U.S. release marks six weeks since the recent uptick in news out of Israel and Gaza, a constant stream of horror that, for many Westerners, has become a harsh stream of deadly white noise, enhancing the powerlessness people might already feel under the bootheels of unchecked capitalist systems. Finland, despite its social safety nets, relies on its free market, and is no stranger to labor exploitation, which impacts both leads as the film goes on. These circumstances create a perfect storm of despondency, which Pöysti and Vatanen wear on their sleeves in every scene.
As Holappa — whose first name neither we nor Ansa ever learn; he always feels incomplete — Vatanen’s attention always seems drawn elsewhere, to some other time, place, or activity. When Holappa toils away at work, he’d rather be in his quarters. When he’s chatting with his aging bunkmate, Huotari (played with wonderfully subdued anxiety about his appearance by Janne Hyytiäinen), he’d rather be out drinking. When he’s out drinking, he can’t seem to find what makes him happy, but Ansa’s sudden presence in his life offers him a novel sense of calm, of centeredness.
Similarly, the way Pöysti wanders through the world as Ansa feels particularly without purpose, whether navigating her employers’ draconian rules about taking home expired goods or dealing with the bizarre glares of the shop’s burly security guard. Nothing seems to make a dent in her façade — not as a matter of resilience, but of depressed resignation. That is, until Holappa enters the fray.
He’s tall and mysterious, but in a grubby kind of way; he’d be a “bad boy” if he weren’t so lackadaisical, his attention so scattered. Ansa, meanwhile, has an angelic quality to her which Pöysti goes to great lengths to hide. It emerges suddenly and unexpectedly during the couple’s withheld exchanges, each time she cracks a hint of a smile. She glows with the thoughts of the future and of possibility. He becomes engaged for once, focused on her and her alone. Their eyes meet for the briefest of moments as they escape their respective troubles, and the result is movie magic.
The universe keeps throwing curveballs their way, each more confounding and dispiriting than the last. But as the film goes on, the sheer possibility that their lives could be better together feels gilded and tangible, making each absurd hurdle worth the attempt, despite their inevitable stumbles. Few films this sardonic have also given way to such rapturous euphoria, the kind that reminds you that life, in all its sadness and strangeness, can still be worth living.
Fallen Leaves opens in theaters Nov. 17.
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