Worth: $17.00
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Cast:
Alma Pöysti, Jussi Vatanen
Intro:
The occasional jokes are as funny as they are deadpan. The little gestures and touches of affection between the characters are both plausible and endearing. There is no straining for effect, but it lifts your mood by osmosis.
Kaurismäkiesque should be a well-known term among lovers of arthouse cinema. People can then use it in the way that we sometimes say, such and such a scene or situation is Bergmanesque.
So, what is the world of this deeply humanist Finish filmmaker (The Other Side of Hope, Le Havre)? It is a world in which honest, slightly offbeat, characters drift without connection or malice. A world in which they display brief glimpses of dry humour that anchor their characters and induce a wry smile of affection and recognition in the audience. Fallen Leaves, the most recent of the filmmaker’s oeuvre, does all of the above and the result is yet another gentle crowd pleaser.
In the beginning, we meet Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) – a lugubrious stick of a man. He is forty-something and single, mooching from one heavy industrial job to another. He is a bit lonely and a bit alcoholic. He is not afraid of hard work, and he goes about his arduous tasks without complaint. He is fine when he is working, but busybodies keep insisting on on-site breath tests and Holappa likes a good glug from his hip flask before his shift, so jobs go as quickly as they come.
Quite early on, he meets Ansa (Alma Poysti), who is pretty and shy and reasonably happy, if also a little underemployed. They hit it off, and at the end of their first date, she writes down her number so he can call and arrange a second one. Holappa carelessly lets the precious bit of paper fall into the gutter. At this point, you can hear the audience gasp as we know the potential consequences of this loss. Will he ever find her again, even if he wanders every street in Helsinki? He doesn’t even know her name. Fortunately, in Kaurismäki’s world, things do somehow work out for the best.
The director doesn’t spend much time complicating things. The set ups are simple, and half the scenes are in bars or rooms that look as if they have been knocked up out of hardboard that morning and painted in pastel colours.
The characters always seem to exist in their own world, though every now and then, there are judicious touches of the real. For example, both Ansa and Holoppa hear snippets on the radio about the Ukraine War (sadly still relevant today even if it has largely dropped out of the news cycle). They mostly turn the radio off as their lives are hard enough as it is.
The film is far from grim though. The occasional jokes are as funny as they are deadpan. The little gestures and touches of affection between the characters are both plausible and endearing. There is no straining for effect, but it lifts your mood by osmosis.
People who are already part of his deserved cult following won’t need any further invitation. People who don’t know Kaurismäki’s work should seek out this charming, deceptively simple romance.
