Movie Review: Fallen Leaves, Aki Kaurismaki's latest comedy – Vulture

The good Aki Kaurismäki delivers one in every of his most charming movies with this story of missed romantic connections.
Photograph: Mubi

An 81-minute, dryly humorous, pop-inflected romance, Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves at occasions feels just like the lightest of flicks, however it additionally takes place towards a canvas of soul-crushing gloom. That’s nothing new for the legendary Finnish director, whose characters’ deadpan submersion typically looks like the one sane response to a chilly, callous world. However that is one in every of his extra hopeful works. There’s a smile ready to be born in Fallen Leaves, and we are able to really feel it coming.

After we first meet Ansa (Alma Pöysti), she’s pricing gadgets in a grocery store, checking their sell-by dates and tossing out those which have expired. Different staff undergo the identical motions, the repetitive work simply part of total lives swallowed by routine. Ansa takes one expired merchandise residence each night time for dinner, when she sits in her tiny flat and listens to the radio information concerning the warfare in Ukraine. Elsewhere in Helsinki, Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) works at a development website, a trusty liquor bottle seemingly by no means too far out of attain. Again and again, we see the sheer waste that surrounds these characters: expired meals, demolished buildings, rusted pipe fittings, scraps of steel. The devastation in Ukraine, provided by common radio experiences, looks like an extension of a world that doesn’t want or need people in it. These characters themselves appear only one step away from being discarded someplace on this chilly, industrial cityscape.

Sure, it’s a comedy and a romance. However for many of its working time, Fallen Leaves performs out as a collection of disappointments. Ansa and Holappa meet at a karaoke bar that they sometimes frequent with their workmates, a heat place festooned with traditional film posters, however from there on out it’s principally missed connections. Holappa can’t maintain down a job as a result of he’s acquired a little bit of an angle; the ingesting doesn’t assist, both. Ansa is proud, headstrong, and poor. When Holappa comes over for dinner one night time, she has to go to the shop and purchase a second plate and a second fork.

Although they’re drawn in easy strains, there’s a profound longing to those characters. Kaurismäki’s movies have all the time had a particular reference to music, and the songs right here — be they karaoke performances of rock, folks, and classical tunes, or a showstopping look late within the movie by the Finnish indie-pop duo Maustetytöt (“I’m a prisoner right here endlessly / Even the graveyard is by fences sure / When my earthly time period is lastly finished / You’ll simply dig me deeper into the bottom”) — replicate an unexpressed despair, a rising sense that there’s acquired to be extra to life than this. The film and its textures converse for these individuals, who stay tight-lipped and stone-faced, although all the time on the verge of discovering one thing about themselves.

Kaurismäki emerged within the Nineteen Eighties, a dry trickster who merged the misfit cinema of Rainer Werner Fassbinder with the suave deadpan of Wenders, Jarmusch, and others. Through the years, he’s caught fervently to his aesthetic, making his distinctive movies with out ceding any floor to revenue or vogue. The films really feel stripped down — the tales are fundamental, the characters spare, the feelings muted — however like nice poems, they include untold depths. There’s life boiling beneath the straightforward surfaces, which is each Kaurismäki’s aesthetic mantra and his nice theme. At their greatest, these quiet, cool movies tear you to items. Fallen Leaves already looks like one in every of his signature works.

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