Aki Kaurismäki has the genius of captivating the viewer with apparently simple stories that hide great emotions. Who needs a bombardment of special effects or a lot of action when the Finnish filmmaker seduces us with an atypical love story between two lonely beings? The film is entitled Fallen Leaves, in reference to the famous song by Joseph Kosma and Jacques Prévert, and with it the director returns for the fifth time to the Cannes Film Festival after winning the Grand Jury Prize 21 years ago with A Man Without a Past.
Criticism has immediately turned to this film set in a 2024 Helsinki that seems to have stuck in the past with the war in Ukraine still occupying the main radio news. “The war made me feel that this damn world needed some love stories, but it doesn’t matter what we do in Finland,” Kaurismäki, a firm contender for the Palme d’Or, stated emphatically at a press conference.
Documenting the war in his film is key so that people can “see it and understand how cruel and stupid the conflict was years later,” he added. In a similar vein, the filmmaker already included the Tiananmen Square massacre in The Girl from the Match Factory, from 1990.
With this film, which is less than an hour and a half long, which is infinitely appreciated, the director advocates love as an antidote to world conflict. A love starring the characters that Jussi Vatanen and Alma Pöysti embody with conviction. She lives alone and works as a stock clerk in a supermarket until she is fired for putting an expired sandwich in her bag. She then starts washing dishes in a bar where the owner deals drugs.
He is not doing better. He works in a metallurgical factory but his alcohol problems don’t help at all. “I don’t know if I drink because I’m depressed or I’m depressed because I drink,” he blurts out to a partner with whom he goes to karaoke at night. There he will meet that blonde woman of few words with whom he will later go to the cinema to see The Dead Do Not Die, a zombie film by Jim Jarmusch that opened in Cannes in 2019. At the exit, two spectators compare her with Godard and ‘Breson ‘. Laughter in the room.
And it is that, making use of many moments of humor, Fallen leaves also seems like a great tribute to the cinema with nods to Roco and his brothers or Chaplin as a great inspiration in the midst of a bleak panorama with characters who fight against precariousness, the lack of money and opportunities that consume a city in which technology practically does not exist in the middle of 2024.
The decoration of the protagonist’s house seems to be from the 50s, just like the radio that does not stop releasing the number of daily deaths due to the conflict. The Le Havre author’s camera focuses on the lost faces of the men in the bar, a battered and aging working class who drinks and enjoys, yes, movies and music.
Despite everything, he looks optimistically to the future and seems to say that, even if everything falls apart, there will always be solidarity and love to get ahead. Yes, Kaurismäki continues to trust in the great values ​​of humanity, something that is more necessary than ever to revalue on the big screen. Avalon will soon be in charge of distributing Fallen leaves in Spain.
