New York Film Festival 2023

[Chris Knipp]

AKI KAURISMÄKII: FALLEN LEAVES/KUOLLEET LENDET (2023)


JUSSI VATANEN AND ALMA POYSTI IN FALLEN LEAVES

Two lonely people who meet each other by chance in the Helsinki night and try to find the first love of their lives.

The two people this time are shy, blonde Ansa (Alma Pöysti) and tall, long-faced Holappa (Jussi Vatanen). Both work in factories. Holappa is an alcoholic. The vicissitudes of their tentative, yet somehow determined relationship involve Holappa's reaching a bottom after being fired from a good factory job and then from a not quite so good construction site job and winding up in a halfway house, after which Ansa and Holappa go off, as it were, into the unset. For those familiar with the mechanisms of addiction and recovery, the treatment of this process by Kaurismäki leaves out too much to be of value.

The fairytale simplicity and dry humor that have made Kaurismäki a cinephile delight since the eighties are there. The bright colored images, the somehow engaging dreariness of the urban locations and the karaoke and loud toe-tapping rock and roll music bring the Finnish night to life. But this is a meal that leaves one feeling rather a little hungry, compared to delights like Shadows in Paradise, Ariel, Leningrad Cowboys Go America, The Match Factory Girl, The Man Without a Past, Lights in the Dusk and the more upbeat recent Le Havre and The Other Side of Hope - mainly because of the superficial way Holappa's alcoholism is dealt with, but also a lack of memorable incident. Owen Gleiberman in Variety calls Fallen Leaves "a nice but exceedingly minor movie" that "leaves little imprint." For Kaurismäki devotees this will have to be watched; newcomers should look elsewhere for an introduction to this unique filmmaker. The rapture at Cannes for this film that baffled Gleiberman must be due, we must agree, for the nostalgia that his very consistent style awakens in fans.

The couple's first date goes well as can be expected for two lonely, shy people. After a meal and a film, Holappa asks Ansa for her phone number which she jots on a piece of paper. The paper immediately blows away. They don't know where each other lives and haven't even exchanged names, so they go searching for each other. Holappa stands a long time in front of the retro cinema where they saw Jim Jarmusch's The Dead Don't Die, which she had found hilarious. Ansa waits sadly by her telephone.

Scenes of Holappa show that he is never without a flask and drinks at work and everywhere else, all day long. (Considering this, he seems remarkable free of signs of drinking.) An invitation to dinner chez Ansa is a disaster: it reveals Holappa's heavy drinking to her. She declares that both her father and brother died of alcoholism and she cannot have another drunk in her life. She throws in the kitchen trash the extra table setting she had bought to serve dinner for two.

Through the film there is the thread of music. The first meeting was at karaoke wwhere Holappa was taken by an older friend with a rich baritone voice and a comically exaggerated sense of his own musical talent and prowess with women. Another thread is Russia's war on the Ukraine. Ansa listens to news of it on an old fashioned looking radio on her kitchen table, then shuts it off. A modern note in Kaurismäki's unchanging world is acknowledgement of the existence of computers with internet. Ansa rents the use of one for ten euros a half hour to look for work after being fired from her grocery store job for giving expired food to a homeless person. (No good deed goes unpunished.)

But in Kaurismäki the humble working class drones whose fates are depicted with deadpan tenderness hold out some kind of hope, and the simplicity of the style is a reassuring gesture toward better days. Peter Bradshaw noted that he found himself "rooting for the hero and heroine" in Fa hllen Leaves "in an uncomplicated way" that he hadn't "for any other film at Cannes," and that is another way of seeing how festivals still welcome this movie despite it's not being up to his best. But for me the obstacle to my previous admiration for his work is the too-easy solution to Holappa's alcoholism. This time the director has bitten off more than he can swallow without chewing.

Fallen Leaves/Kuolleet Lendet, 81 mins., debuted at Cannes May 23, 2023. It was screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival. Metacritic rating: 7̶9̶%̶ 86% (3/14/2024). In France the AlloCiné press rating is 4.1 (=82%).