(courtesy IMP Awards)
In most romantic tales, love is writ big, large and heart-swooningly bold.
We’re told that falling in love is the stuff of epic legend and transformative change, and true, it often can be, and so the stories we see, often on the big screen, are massive in intent, scope and telling and we are left in the aftermath of such seismically large emotions, to wonder how it is that you go from that kind of euphoria to living it in a day-to-day realm.
Fallen Leaves (Kuolleet lehdet) by written and directed by Aki Kaurismäki obviates that precipitously tricky leap from cloud nine to the clay feet of mortality by keeping things small and manageable, anchoring his two key characters, Ansa (Alma Pöysti) and Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) in a world that doesn’t leave much for big or massive or epic.
It’s a very economically and socially tightly proscribed world cast in shadows and night, in menial, poorly-paid jobs and ill-kempt bars full of people who stare balefully ahead as if all the emotion and possibility of life has been sucked from them, leaving little more than a desiccated shell.
And when you consider everything they have to contend them, it makes sense.
They live in a world where firing is instant and unflinchingly uncaring, where one bad move and your tenuous existence suddenly becomes all but impossible, where you can be housed and fed one night and out on the streets the next.
A stripped back, dog-eat-dog world like that leaves precious room or time for luxuries such as hope, or in the case of Fallen Leaves, love; and yet, for all the grim bleakness and cinematographically, the film barely leaves the darkness and shadowy nothing of its overall look until its final hopeful frames, there is a questing, a longing for something more than simply surviving.
Long buried, it finds highly tentative expression one night when alcoholic chain-smoking Holappa, a welder and builder who moves from job to job as his addiction surfaces and comes to the attention of his then-boss, goes to a dark and dingy karaoke bar with his friend and workmate Huotari (Janne Hyytiäinen) who proceeds to chat up Ansa’s best friend Liisa (Nuppu Koivu) after she compliments Huotari on his deep, soulful rendition of a song he loves.
Ansa, who is a lowly-paid supermarket/factory worker who’s inherited her godmother’s micro-small studio apartment in yet another dank neighbourhood of peeling paint buildings and poorly-lit streets – wherever this is in Finland, it needs a big council budget – doesn’t say anything to Holappa but they do keep checking each other out and it’s clear that there’s some kind of nascent connection there.
But only when they run into each other in pretty extraordinary circumstances which should be left to the viewing of Fallen Leaves that they go for pastry and coffee and have one of those awkwardly stilted but somehow meaningful first dates that, if you were watching, you’d assume would end right there in that restaurant.
But something has stuck and and they go from the cafe to the cinema to see a zombie film, The Dead Don’t Die, a movie which thematically fits the overall feel of Fallen Leaves perfectly, and afterwards, Ansa gives Holappa her number on a piece of paper (though the film has a contemporary setting with the news full of stories about the war in Ukraine, everything about feels forlornly retro and backwards, anchored in some sort of badly-financed past).
Alas, Holappa loses the piece of paper and his only course of action to ever see Ansa again, who has written him off as some sort of flake, is to wait at the cinema, which is near her home, in the hope she’ll by some time.
She does, and things progress but in this endearingly odd film where everything, including love, is muted and dialled down in line with a world which brooks no colourful extravagance or hopeful largesse, the path forward isn’t smooth, remotely epic or often promising and the love affair between the two toned-down lovebirds is a long and agonisingly pot-holed one.
The funny thing, and this is mean quite literally, about Fallen Leaves is that for all its baleful lostness, it’s actually filled with a significant amount of comedy.
Much of the dialogue is deliberately written to be stilted and overdone, a way, you suppose, of heightening a world which is not predisposed in way, shape or form to that happening, and while you think it might get swallowed by scenes which lose themselves in a magnificently bleak nothingness, it actually accents them beautifully, leaving you laughing in scenes which by rights should be gobbling up whole any sense of pleasure or joy as they often do for the characters.
At one point, for instance, Huotari asks Holappa why he drinks so much, a pointed question which garners the following giggle-worthy response – “I drink because I am depressed” … “Why are you depressed?” … “Because I drink.”
It’s piece of Catch-22-esque perfectly rendered dialogue that might sound clunky and dad joke-y but which, courtesy of Vatanen’s pitch perfect delivery, feels knowingly sad and hilarious all at once.
From dialogue which plays comedically with the dark sadness of its characters and the endless pointlessness of the world they inhabit, to song and music choices like Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No.6 in B Minor Op. 74″ Pathetique which absolutely nails the tone and messaging of the early scene in which it sits, Fallen Leaves has a lot more life and humour than you might expect and which lifts it from being a possible slog through the grimness of life on the bottom rung of society to something remarkable life-affirming and quite, sweetly lovely.
It’s a strange little film in many ways, anchored in an almost cartoonishly heightened world of no choice and little possibility, but Fallen Leaves is also rich and funny and alive because despite all the existential and sometime literal obstacles that lie in their way which should by any reasonable measure convince Ansa and Holappa to give up, they tenaciously persevere, driven by a need for connection and belonging, and yes, even love, and come out the other side with that rarest of treasures, a living, breathing, if tentative relationship which won’t like fix much of anything but which might make it all just a little more bearable.