Fallen Leaves

  In Aki Kaurismaki’s new film, men coming out of a rep cinema say the Jim Jarmush film  The Dead Don't Die reminds them of Diary of a Country Priest and Bande a Part, respectively. Fair enough. Our film has its own apparently lifeless heroes in staggering tsearch of rebirth. Their heartening tale is conveyed through Bresson’s skeletal aesthetic and Godard’s  (albeit way lower key) outsiders. 

Anyway, Fallen Leaves reminds me of Ozu — a subdued minimalist almost static anatomy of a season as an emblem of the current human condition. As the title— and the closing song, with Autumn in for Fallen — suggests, we’re in a chilly, bleak, tired world, sapped of colour and energy. But the heart beats on, especially those of our dulled central couple whose solitudes ache for their intuited connection.

The course of their true love is hobbled by Holappa’s weakness — drink — and his accidents, whether losing her number or walking into a train. Meanwhile Anya  patiently survives on her own. When she loses her shelf-stacking job for pinching a past-date pastry, she takes a drudge job in a pub. That ends when her boss is busted for drug dealing. Thence to a sheetmetal factory — the industry in which Holappa has his union card. He struggles on his own, with neither union support — until she recovers him at the hospital, retrieving him from a coma.

Anya’s second job is dramatically masculine, sweaty factory work. It involves her in some heavy digging and some heavier carting. This balances — and saves from cliche — her larger woman’s project, saving her man from his destructive weaknesses. 

When she adopts a dog she demonstrates her generous impulse to care for the desperate, to add a relationship to her solitude. Having inherited her small flat from her godmother, Anya is a step up the social ladder from her working friends — and a ladder above her lover.

Amid the cold barren settings the backgrounds bristle with film posters. Cinema provides a rich escape denied these characters’ real lives. Holappa waits outside the cinema in futile hope of meeting Anya again. A ring of cigarette butts tells her he had been there.  

The last shot echoes Chaplin (the auteur not Anya’s dog). The lovers walk into the sunset of a cold, heartless world. The factory scenes recall the dehumanizing sterility of Modern Times. And in the spirit of The Great Dictator the outside news world boils down to Russia's horrible barbaric  attack upon innocent Ukraine. Not a saving barber in sight.

Six months later the soundtrack would have added the October 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s response. No resurgent spring there either. We're into the winter of discontent. 

        But Kaurismaki's small, touching lives go on, in a carefully controlled simplicity. Elegance can also be stark.