Fallen Leaves

(Kuolleet Lehdet)

dir: Aki Kaurismäki

2023

Fallen Leaves is the most recent film from Finland’s greatest ever director. Well, I say that, knowing nothing about Finland’s film industry. There could be way better directors in Finland. But none of them have had anywhere near the level of international acclaim as Aki Kaurismäki. It’s probably because he’s been doing it for forty years or so. It’s possibly because of the quality of his films.

It could be because of the fact that his name rhymes so wonderfully. Aki Kaurismäki. Rolls off the tongue.

He is at least the only one who routinely got played in arthouse cinemas in Australia over the years. If there is a single other popular or critically acclaimed Finnish director, I haven’t heard of them, and I hear about a lot of people from a lot of places. Renny Harlin is the only other one I can think of, and he hasn’t made anything vaguely good in decades. The only other Finnish film I can think of that’s come out recently is that one where the gold prospector kills all them fucking Nazis, which was delightful (Sisu), but that’s only one movie.

My man Aki has been pumping them out since the 80s. Since Leningrad Cowboys Go America, he has been delighting audiences around the world with his cinematic antics. Maybe “delighting” is too strong a term. I don’t know if he’s even that well-known and beloved in Finland.

His films are so strictly formalist and the humour is so droll and deadpan that I don’t even know if they’re really that representative of Finnish culture or sensibilities, contemporary or otherwise. Maybe they’re more sophisticated than the rest of us. Maybe they still think Benny Hill is the pinnacle of human achievement. I don’t know. I actually know some Finnish people, and, I’ll tell you something for free, they think Australians are total yokel hillbillies.

But, and this is a big butt and I cannot lie about it, they are as likely to laugh uproariously at something they find funny, or loudly express themselves about something they care about as possibly anyone else on the planet, so this impression you get from Finnish flicks generally or the whole idea of those Nordic regions about how restrained and expression-less they are is of course bullshit.

Everyone is restrained with people they don’t know. In their own elements, well, they carry on like pork chops or whatever the Finnish equivalent is.

This film isn’t going to disabuse anyone of the idea that Finnish people are anything other than alcoholics and expressionless zombies, but seen in the context of what passes for humour in Kaurismäki’s head, there are boundless opportunities for amusement. The performances are stilted, sometimes uncomfortable, lightly rehearsed and delivered with few takes beyond one. The irony and the wry absurdity of human actions and institutions overwhelms the simplest scenes.

But, also, Kaurismaki is not some young neophyte picking up a camera for the first time: he knows the milieu in which his movies exist (or at least the privileged ghetto outside of Finland that categorises his flicks in the arthouse category putting him firmly next to peers like Jim Jarmusch whose The Dead Don’t Die is watched at the cinema by two of the characters in this film). More than that he wants his films to be seen within the greater film canon that he loves, is inspired by and wants to be a part of (Godard, Chaplin, Keaton, Marcel Carne, Bresson, Melville), hence all the movie posters throughout the flick.

And who are the main characters in this flick (all of his flicks?) Sad, lonely people working menial jobs. You may think that’s bleak, but consider the fact that there will always be, as long as there is human society, sad lonely people working menial unfulfilling jobs. Bleak doesn’t even come close to covering it. That doesn’t change. Whether it’s in a socialist paradise like Finland, or the French port city in Le Havre, or London, his flicks are always about the aforementioned. This isn’t part of his so-called ‘proletarian’ trilogy, but it fits in snuggly right next to it.

Ansa (Alma Pöysti) works stacking shelves in a supermarket. She takes food about to expire home, microwaves it, then throws it away. She switches on the radio, and the news reports constantly (throughout the film) report on the devastation of Ukrainian cities by the Russian army. It’s set somewhat contemporarily, but the clothes and the décor could be 1950s / 1960s / 1970s.

People drink and drink and drink in this flick, and it brings them absolutely no joy, not even moments of mild happiness. Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) even drinks on the job when he thinks no-one is looking. He works in some steelworks sandblasting, I dunno, train wheels, however many hours a day.

If I had to do that job I’d probably want to drink on the job too. The reoccurring, constantly re-emphasised theme is that these places the characters work are shitty place to work, and the small-mindedness of the bosses makes it even worse.

From where they work they go back to their meagre accommodations where they have nothing to do, and then they sleep. Rinse, repeat.

A co-worker encourages Holappa to come to a bar where they have karaoke that night. The songs are Finnish “classics” from a bygone era. A co-worker encourages Ansa to come to karaoke that night. Ansa and Holappa nearly meet that night, but they don’t.

For different reasons of absurdity, they both lose their jobs: Ansa because, when she was throwing expired food into the dumpster, allowed a homeless guy to take a couple of items otherwise destined for landfill. The supermarket manager chooses to see this as theft and lets her go.

She works at a pub washing glasses. The owner gets pinched by the cops for selling drugs, just as she was about to get paid for her week’s work. Holappa gets work in the construction industry, despite being in the metalworkers union, but is told it doesn’t matter anyway. And they’re right, it doesn’t matter, because he’s drinking more blatantly, and that’s not going to fly.

He is asked why he drinks, and he tries to explain that he’s in a cycle – he drinks because he’s depressed, and he’s depressed because he drinks. There’s a scene in a pub or bar, of a whole bunch of middle-aged people grimly knocking back their drinks, like programmed robots. There is no joy, no release in any of it. We could only watch that and think “what the fuck are these people doing?”

Holappa and Ansa cross paths again, and he offers to buy her coffee, strudel, whatever the fuck people eat at cafes in Finland, and they engage with each other politely. This is not the first blush of romance, this is not the thrill of attraction or the hunger of raw need: this is depressed people in their 40s speaking to each other with the passion of a bus driver mentioning that the next stop is the last stop.

But they are desperately lonely, you see, and no-one else in all of Helsinki will have them. Yet the film is not happy for them to come together just yet, and have sex or something like normal people. Wicked fate taunts them by keeping them apart a little while longer as various other things go right or wrong in their lives. And then there’s the problem of Holappa’s drinking, of course, which Ansa won’t tolerate. She’s depressed because she’s alone, but she won’t tolerate a drunk, having lost her father and brother to the demon drink.

To that Holappa says “fuck that, no-one tells me what to do”, and goes on losing. He has to lose virtually everything (he has very little) before thinking “maybe the booze isn’t bringing me the fame and good fortune that I thought it would, and I should quit”, but of course then irony has to step in and keep them apart even further.

If you can get on the wavelength of these films, then they can be very enjoyable, even if they feel a bit constrained, a bit airless. I enjoyed this flick a lot even as I marvelled at how strange and awkward everything felt. I have a pretty low threshold for awkward, but contextually, thinking about how everything fits together, and marvelling at what the director and actors were coming up with, this flick was simultaneously absurd and still wryly amusing all the same. Kaurismäki isn’t just one of Finland’s great directors, he’s one of Europe’s great directors, and his flicks always have something meaningful to say, either about humanity or cinema, or, luckily, both.

8 times the leaves fall and the booze runs out yet Putin should still go to hell out of 10

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“All men are pigs.”
- “They’re not. Pigs are intelligent and sympathetic.” – she’s got us pegged - Fallen Leaves