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Fallen Leaves ★★★½
(M) 81 minutes
When you go into an Aki Kaurismaki movie, you know what you’re getting. Since the 1980s, Finland’s most celebrated misery-guts has built an international reputation on a specific brand of absurdist minimalism – and in recent decades, he’s been more than ever committed or resigned to playing the hits.
Alma Poysti (left) and Nuppu Koivu in Fallen Leaves.Credit: Malla Hukkanen/Sputnik via Palace Films
Typically, we’re in a rundown urban setting, most commonly a version of Helsinki that has come slightly unstuck from the present day. The out-of-time quality is reinforced by the melancholic, yet inviting 35-millimetre cinematography, with firmly placed shadows recalling Edward Hopper’s nocturnal cityscapes.
Kaurismaki’s latest, Fallen Leaves, ticks all these boxes while offering itself as a chaste, slow-burning romance between ordinary folk in the Brief Encounter mould (an oddly marketable arthouse sub-genre at present, in Australia as elsewhere).
The lonely souls here are the sort sometimes described by Australian politicians as “battlers”: Ansa (Alma Poysti) and Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), employed respectively as a supermarket shelf-stacker and a metalworker.
Both look to be in their 40s, but could well be younger, given how far life has evidently worn them down. Holappa is an alcoholic, although within Kaurismaki’s vision of Finnish society that isn’t far from the norm.
Alma Poysti and Jussi Vatanen in Fallen Leaves, a chaste, slow-burning romance between ordinary folk.Credit: Malla Hukkanen/Sputnik via PalaceFilms
In Kaurismaki’s usual manner, the pair’s reticence is pushed to the point of parody: not only does physical intimacy appear out of the question, it’s a challenge for them to reach a point where they’re comfortable disclosing their names. Their time together is dominated by long silences, during which they remain in static poses before a camera likewise fixed in place, as if neither the characters nor the filmmaker had anywhere to go.
Kaurismaki is a softie, really, and doesn’t care who knows it (the movie even has a dog). But the ironic pessimism that has been his career-long signature is real too: by design, Fallen Leaves isn’t so much a romance as a series of gestures towards the idea of one. You can’t tell this kind of story any more, is the implication, but wouldn’t it be nice if you could?