If you want to find real delight and romantic spark at the cinema this weekend, make time for the delicate, deadpan Fallen Leaves.
Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki is known for a very particular and unusual style: ordinary Finns moving through a drab and recognisable world, both our own (he touches on the migrant crisis and the Russian invasion of Ukraine) and also thoroughly his own. It takes time to get into the momentum of Kaurismäki’s films – he uses unshowy static shots and features actors who restrain emotion as much as possible. But the rewards are immense.
Ansa (Alma Pöysti, buoyant and likeable) is a supermarket employee who is one day fired for an absurd misdemeanour (giving perfectly good food she’s supposed to bin to a homeless person). Lonely and lost, she wanders one evening into a karaoke bar and meets Holappa (Jussi Vatanen, a droopy-faced and often monosyllabic type), a construction worker who seems equally bereft.
They end up on a date at the cinema and their romance appears to be quickly in flight: even though Ansa has to run out to buy a second set of cutlery and an additional plate for Holappa’s visit, such is the depth of her solitude.
As sweet as their burgeoning relationship is, it comes with its challenges: misunderstandings, arguments, and most of all, Holappa’s drinking problem, which also plagued Ansa’s father. But humour abounds in spite of these serious obstacles, and in its more serious moments, there’s a beautifully austere visual shorthand – Kaurismäki holds his lens on the sight of a pile of cigarette ends or a stray dog’s wet eyes.
Fallen Leaves is set, technically, in contemporary Finland but with nary a smartphone or tech in sight, Ansa and Holappa seem to get most of their news from the radio, which emits troubling developments in Putin’s Russia – a nation Finland borders and has immediate reason to fear. Theirs is a fight against the tide of the inhumane wider picture.
In an exploitative and cruel world, this shambling, quiet romance captures both the void of loneliness and the warmth of human touch. After his last film, 2017’s The Other Side of Hope, Kaurismäki announced his retirement from filmmaking: if this is the extraneous movie we get, I’m very glad he didn’t stick to his word.