Fallen Leaves: Last act of insurrection against system
Fallen Leaves: Last act of insurrection against system – Aki Kaurismaki’s latest film won the Cannes Jury Prize and is competing in two categories at the next Golden Globes.
The first time I interviewed Aki Kaurismaki was on the terrace of a hotel in San Sebastián. He was drunk. It was eleven o’clock in the morning. When the waiter asked him if he now wanted a wine or a beer , he replied pragmatically: “Both.”
He was able to string together a diatribe against Europe and a eulogy in favor of small and cheap cinema. He also professes his love for bars, for music and for Mediterranean countries—particularly Portugal, where he resides most of the year.
Like Kaurismaki, many of his protagonists refuse to choose between a drink, a pint or a cubata.
The bar as a place of communion for agnostics. Kaurismaki may have been able to leave Finland, but Finland has not been able to leave Kaurismaki.
Because of that Baltic sadness and languor, to that apparent epigenetic misanthropy of northern Europe that even they laugh at—those jokes about social distancing in Scandinavia during covid, which was more or less the traditional one before the pandemic.
That tragic and existentialist humor that we Mediterranean people may find disconcerting, is now accompanied by saudade .
But it is true that the filmmaker’s gaze has become warmer, closer, more strangely welcoming in recent years.
His latest film, Fallen Leaves , the love story between two misfits, maintains the Kaurismaki essence but is relieved by a redemptive look at human beings and an inviting desire towards a broader, less specific audience.
A desire for communion that, perhaps, his previous films lacked. Like his protagonist, Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), Kaurismaki seems to seek love above lack of communication.
Kaurismaki’s cinema is born in the convergence of opposites. His films are, at the same time, sad and comic, serious and carefree, with a realistic and, at the same time, unreal staging.
Kaurismaki’s cinema thrives on contradiction and has been purifying and shedding accessories until reaching his most synthetic and — surprisingly — exciting film.
Fallen Leaves seems like a silent film of misunderstandings, one in which the misfortune of the characters ends up causing laughter due to the absurdity—and drama—of the situation. A nervous laugh.
One of the golden rules for Kaurismaki to maintain creative independence in what is probably the most expensive profession and constrained to the will of the market and merchants is to make the cheapest films possible. The smaller the budget, the greater the freedom.
So in Fallen Leaves he only needed a couple of actors, a couple of settings and a millimetric look attentive to any variation within the repetition, within the custom.
The main characters, allergic to visual and vocal contact, get closer by displacing the emptiness between them and around them.
As another example of the contradictions of his cinema, his least ambitious film is the one that has achieved the most international recognition. After more than thirty years of a career largely ignored outside the European auteur circuit — except for the Oscar nomination for best foreign film in 2003 for A Man Without a Past — Fallen Leaves is competing in two categories at the Golden Globes — one of them for its actress, Alma Pöysti , an achievement for an unknown actress and in a performance in such a minority language as Finnish—and will most likely also compete at the Oscars, in addition to having won the Jury Prize at Cannes.
At the most prolific moment of his career—the 1990s— Kaurismaki released three films in the same year; in the last decade he has been much less lavish, seeking in the bareness of his staging the essence of his worldview.
Fallen Leaves is a cute movie , in a non-pejorative sense . It’s cute because it’s idealistic, because there is something tremendously naive in its characters—not in the director’s gaze, which is even melancholic—despite the decadence and unfairness of its reality.
There is a redemptive will, to believe in the transformative and palliative virtue of human relationships.
As is usual in his films, the protagonists are two extraordinarily normal people who belong to the precariat and who are on the verge of social exclusion, but without drama, from passive resistance.
She is Ansa (Alma Pöysti), a supermarket worker who is fired for taking two expired sandwiches.
He is Holappa ( Jussi Vatanen ), an operator in a steel mill who is fired from work due to alcoholism problems. Even in both situations, Kaurismaki finds space for social criticism from absurdity.
A gray and taciturn Helsinki serves as the setting for the alienating daily life of the two protagonists.
In the background, on the radio, news of the war in Ukraine anchors Fallen Leaves in time and reality.
He and she try to survive in a structure that wants them to be productive and lethargic, but that does not allow the slightest dysfunction. Until one day they meet by chance and start looking for each other.
Within the inhumanity of the system they find warmth and hope in a common imagined future, in their clumsy and silent dates, in going to the movies together to see The Dead Don’t Die, by Jim Jarmusz, at the movies.
At their paroxysmally modest dinners. In their long silences. In their confusions and reluctance.
Because, furthermore, Kaurismaki’s own form of interpretation — “I don’t want the actors to act” —, so laundered of feelings and intentions, so monotonous, expands that feeling of strangeness, of distance between the protagonists and the world that surrounds them. They can finally be alone together.
Also moving and comical is the moment in which Huotari ( Janne Hyytiäinen ), Holappa’s friend, with an expressionless expression, reveals himself as a dedicated melodic singer, clinging to the fantasy that one day a talent scout will discover him, despite his questionable vocal abilities.
All the characters, in some way, live longer projecting themselves in fantasy than on the ground they walk on.
And alcohol is another way to escape. As in many of Kaurismaki’s films, bars, distilleries and karaoke bars are very present in Fallen Leaves.
And like many of his characters—Reino in Grab Your Handkerchief, Tatiana , for example—, the protagonist has a problem with the bottle , which at the same time evades him and sinks him.
Ansa, who knows the tragedy of alcoholism, warns him. But, despite all the vicissitudes its characters go through.
Fallen Leaves is a luminous film, because it is infected by the deeply humanistic and empathetic gaze of its director, because it still demonstrates faith in others, in the human species, in the small great connections, in understanding failures, in giving second and third chances, in love as an act of resistance and even of insurrection.
