Kuolleet lehdet
***½/****
starring Alma Pöysti, Jussi Vatanen, Janne Hyytiäinen, Nuppu Koivu
written and directed by Aki Kaurismäki
by Walter Chaw I adore Aki Kaurismäki, the deadpan, live-action Bill Plympton of Finland, who tells his small stories, little romances and tiny tragedies, with a style one might call rigid but that for me plays like the legacy of Fassbinder carried through into our dotage. (Mine and his, had he lived.) Kaurismäki’s latest film, Fallen Leaves, reminds me a lot, in fact, of Fassbinder’s winsome Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), about a young Tunisian immigrant who falls for an older cleaning lady in West Germany. Its story of star-crossed lovers, separated by culture and generation, race and creed, is presented with the kind of simplicity that’s all the more emotionally lacerating for its reserve. Fassbinder’s slow, mannered pace allows his actors to find their breath, to expand into the skins of their characters so that we register every minute change in expression, every tightening of the skin by the eye, every roll of the muscle in the jaw when a small slight lands like a blow. Kaurismäki’s pictures engage in the same slowing-down, the same understated dialogue, the same complexity of emotion.
In Fallen Leaves, two lonesome people in an emptied-out Helsinki miraculously find each other and are faced with a series of unfortunate events that conspire to keep them apart. Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) is a construction worker and an alcoholic who gets away with drinking on the job for a while, until he doesn’t. Ansa (Alma Pöysti) is a grocery-store clerk who’s fired one night for taking home expired food. In a show of solidarity, her peers walk out with her. Drowning their sorrows at a pub on karaoke night, Ansa and Holappa meet for the first time. During another chance encounter, she gives him her phone number, but he loses it immediately. Because they’re in the same orbit of minor calamities (her new boss at a bar gets arrested for drug dealing; he’s injured on the job but misses out on compensation due to the results of a Breathalyzer test), they’re reunited. Over a modest dinner, Holappa tries to sneak a slug, and Ansa tells him her father and brother died of drink and then her mother of a broken heart. He leaves angrily, and she adopts a dog. And then, in their separate spheres of loneliness, Holappa resolves he’s going to try to deserve Ansa.
That’s it. Yet within the spareness of this plot are these flawed, sad human beings yearning for the same companionship they can promise one another. Ansa wants someone who sees the value in her, and Holappa wants someone who thinks he’s worth saving. I thought about a Talking Heads song with a refrain so musically simplistic they subtitled it “Naive Melody,” and how my wife and I chose it for the first dance at our wedding. There’s a line in it that says, “I’m just an animal looking for a home, to share the same space for a minute or two. Will you love me until my heart stops? Love me until I’m dead?” It’s posed as a question, a plea to be affirmed, just like Fallen Leaves the title reminds me of how the Ezra Pound poem “In a Station of the Metro” uses its title to help us equate white petals on a branch to lighted windows on a dark train. Kaurismäki’s fallen leaves–and at one point near the end, he does show us leaves falling from a branch–are Ansa and Holappa: orphaned and in freefall, though their existence has meaning. They have sad histories to bond over, and dreams they need to share before they forget them; they’re survivors, stronger than they look, and they deserve to be treasured. I do treasure them. Kaurismäki, too, and the radical kindness of his art.
