Cinema Without Borders: Make love, not war - Aki Kaurismaki’s Fallen Leaves

Ansa and Holappa have just come out of their first movie date at Ritz theatre. How did she like the film, he asks her. “I never laughed so much,” she says. Ansa (Alma Pöysti) and Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) are the protagonists in Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismaki’s new film Fallen Leaves that premiered in the competition section of the Cannes Film Festival. The film under discussion within the film is Jim Jarmusch’s zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die that, incidentally, was the opening film at Cannes in 2019.

Later, outside the theatre, standing by the poster of David Lean’s 1945 classic, Brief Encounter, Holappa tells Ansa that he doesn’t even know her name. “I’ll tell you next time,” she says, scribbling her phone number on a piece of paper. Time spent well together at the movies holds the promise of another date.

“In a crooked little town, they were lost and never found. Fallen leaves, fallen leaves, fallen leaves on the ground”—the opening lines of the popular song “Fallen Leaves” by Canadian rock band Billy Talent could well be a description of Ansa and Holappa—single, lonely, cast adrift in Helsinki. She works in the supermarket and, later, sorts out plastic to make a living. He is also from the working class, an alcoholic. Both are seeking love yet unsure of it, hesitant about giving in to it. An accidental meeting throws a possibility at them of finding companionship in each other. Will love find a way to them? Or will it be another lost chance?

What follows is a tale of a relationship taking a wrong turn because of a lost piece of paper and an unforeseen mishap. Is romance impossible for them, like it was for Laura and Alec in Brief Encounter, by whose poster they hope for and try to arrange and work out a future together?  

Fallen Leaves might feel like a very simple and straightforward film on paper, and it truly is. But in a good way. There are the poker-faced characters, their banal routines, the automated existence finding release in alcohol, cigarettes and karaoke. It is matched by the film’s own formal, staccato rhythm and aesthetic minimalism. But the invocation of solitariness is not entirely marked by sadness, the mundane is not overly melancholic even as it is moving and moody. Then there are sudden, brilliant bursts of characteristic Scandinavian deadpan humour that make you smile along. Like a macho singer at the karaoke reminded that “tough guys don’t sing”. Or two cinephiles discussing Jarmusch’s film in the same breath as Jean-Luc Godard and Robert Bresson while you wonder they had in common.

Love might be reticent and tentative in Kaurismaki’s world but not entirely absent. It comes home to Ansa in a stray she christens Chaplin. Dogs after all are unconditionally giving where humans stay woefully stingy and frugal with emotions. Incidentally, the mutt who played Chaplin won the Grand Jury prize in Palm Dog, the independent canine competition at Cannes, even as the film itself won the jury prize in the official competition section.

Like the filmmaking itself, the romance might feel spartan, but eventually turns out rich, beautiful and affirming with the deceptively easy but fabulously synergistic performances from Pöysti and Vatanen. And moreso with Kaurismaki’s thoughtful and thought through homages to cinema and the urgent reminder of the paradox of war. The radio broadcast of the Russian aggression in Ukraine forms a permanent soundtrack in the film as much as Kaurismaki’s pick of his own favourite songs and Jarmusch’s film on the zombie apocalypse becomes emblematic of the larger catastrophes and devastation around us.

Ansa and Holappa’s concerted search for love then is like a counter-dote. The two might be in need for it but so is the world at large, more now than ever before. Kaurismaki fashions a gentle, profound, hopeful cinematic gem about the human condition in Fallen Leaves that is of the times yet timeless.