Cannes Winner 'Fallen Leaves' Is A Must Watch

Fallen Leaves Marks A Master's Return

Fallen Leaves is the fourth part of Aki Kaurismäki’s extended working-class trilogy. Prahlad Srihari writes.

ON karaoke night at a Helsinki bar, the kind of place that serves as a sanctuary for those living on auto-pilot and seeking warm relief from chilly despair, Ansa (Alma Pöysti) and Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) lay eyes on each other for the first time. Ansa is there with her work friends. Holappa has been dragged along by his work friend Huotari (Janne Hyytiäinen). While Huotari sings a Finnish folk anthem comically out of tune, Ansa and Holappa trade shy glances of mutual interest, but hesitate to trade words and numbers. Neither has the courage to make a move.

Ansa is a supermarket clerk. Holappa is a factory worker. Her name, meaning “trapped” in Finnish, speaks to where she is at this point in her life. His name, originating from the Russian word holop meaning “slave”, speaks to his (and her) position in a brutal capitalist system and his dependency on alcohol. The early missed connection notwithstanding, Ansa and Holappa bump into each other again. Only their proletarian romance, born out of shared loneliness and malaise, is derailed repeatedly by outside forces and inner demons working in cahoots to keep the pair apart.

Taking the scenic-melancholic route makes all the difference in Fallen Leaves, the fourth part of Aki Kaurismäki’s extended working-class trilogy after Shadows in Paradise (1986), Ariel (1988) and The Match Factory Girl (1990). Six years after calling it quits, Finland’s most beloved auteur has reversed his decision for a finely concocted, bittersweet delicacy. The new film continues his absurdist brand of social realism with such ease it’s like he never left.

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THE UNDERDOGS & OUTCASTS

Fallen Leaves Is Both A — Timeless Film & A Film Of Its Time

By Prahlad Srihari

MAKING A LIVING in an economy driven by zero-hour contracts breeds nothing but economic insecurity and spiritual fatigue. The wages are low, rights limited, and benefits non-existent. Every gig worker is easily replaceable. We see this when Ansa is fired for giving away some expired food to a hungry vagrant and taking some home with her, instead of throwing it all in the dumpster. The capitalist lackey who snitches on her is her own co-worker: a hawk-eyed security guard keeping watch of every minor infraction. Upon her termination, two fellow stockers speak up in solidarity before taking her to the karaoke bar. It takes all kinds, as they say.

The manic-depressive worlds of Kaurismäki are populated with underdogs and outcasts of few words. Though he may have a soft spot for working-class romantics, he doesn’t romanticise their struggles. We meet waste collectors, grocery clerks, miners and factory workers all looking for love, happiness and a little bit of respite from the everyday heaviness of being. Bars take on the significance of a port in a storm. Smoking a cigarette feels like grasping onto a wand of light in the darkness. Alcohol is IV therapy administering the strength to keep going on, drip by drip. Music from the jukebox expresses the ineffable sadness that words can’t. Wearing sunglasses hides the world’s view of how one is feeling. Romance blooms less through words, more through the love language of ellipses, silent gazes and sad songs in between. Fallen Leaves comes alive with all the iconography and visual humour we come to expect in a Kaurismäki film, making it at once an excellent entry point to his work as well as a supercut of it.

Such a degree of continuity shouldn’t be read as a filmmaker trapped in a holding pattern. Because the simplicity of each film masks Kaurismäki’s complete command of his material. The laconic wit of his films makes Jim Jarmusch’s effortlessly cool films sound talky. The minimalist aesthetic makes the meticulous detailing of Wes Anderson’s motion picture-books look gratuitous. Kaurismäki’s approach to humour, however, is more a deadpan extension of the humanist traditions of Charlie Chaplin than the contemplative quirks of Jarmusch and Anderson.

There is no madcap whimsy. No improvised rhythms. But there is a sullen acceptance that life can be a struggle. As a register, Kaurismäki’s deadpan perhaps could be said to epitomise kalsarikännit — Finland’s more gloomy, less camera-ready version of the Danish hygge. A rough translation would be “pantsdrunk”, as in: it’s so cold outside for most of the year, drinking by yourself at home in your underwear sounds a lot cosier. Deadpan humour thus modulates the characters’ way of being and alchemises their dissatisfaction into something droll. On their first date, Ansa and Holappa go to the local cinema to watch Jarmusch’s 2019 zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die, a film a couple of moviegoers preposterously compare to Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1951) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande à Part (1964). “I’ve never laughed so much,” claims Ansa with a matter-of-fact expression on her face. Such dry delivery of one-liners is par for the course in a Kaurismäki film like Fallen Leaves. By playing up the dramatic irony that courses through his work, the filmmaker is practically sharing an inside joke with his viewers.

Nods to classic movies serve a similar function. When Ansa gives Holappa her phone number after the first date, the likelihood of a second is seemingly jinxed by a poster of David Lean’s Brief Encounter watching on from behind. Holappa loses her number to the wind. Thereupon, he visits the theatre every night hoping to run into her, like Chaplin’s Tramp might have in a corresponding situation. When hopes of a romance are thwarted, Ansa adopts a dog she goes on to name Chaplin. The final shot of the film mirrors the ending of City Lights, with a couple walking into the distance — a reference made wink-wink by the dog Chaplin walking alongside them.

Nietzsche once described autumn as “more the season of the soul than of nature.” Going by the title alone, Kaurismäki seems to agree. Ansa and Holappa are two lost souls aching for an autumn of guarded hope so they can face the looming winter of bitter discontent together — and not be elbowed aside alone. There is a quiet humanity to their story which soothes its gloomy fatalism. It shows us a world where people go to the movies, sing karaoke, listen to Schubert, drink champagne aperitifs and fall in love to recharge their spiritual dead batteries.

Always there yet seemingly absent, the lighting in the film creates shadows for characters to hide in and pockets of warmth to take comfort in. Sad song choices — in particular a live rendition of an earworm by Finnish pop duo Maustetytöt — create such a wonderfully comical counterpoint to all the melancholy, it becomes a running joke in itself. The colour contrasts in Kaurismäki’s compositions accentuate a certain beauty despite the bleakness, creating the effect of an otherworldly Helsinki without becoming subsumed by it. A calendar says it’s the year 2024. But Ansa and Holappa can often be seen talking on rotary dial phones. As if to suggest the warm glow of nostalgia cannot melt away the cold hard facts of the present, each time the pair turn on their transistor radio, we hear dispatches from the Ukraine invasion by Russia, a country with which Finland shares its borders. But this incongruous coexistence is what makes Fallen Leaves a timeless film, while also being a film of its time.

Fallen Leaves won the Jury Prize at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. The film had its India premiere at the 2023 MAMI Mumbai Film Festival as part of its World Cinema section. It is available to stream on MUBI.

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