Boy meets girl is a tale as old as time and one that Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki has visited several times in a career that has spanned forty years, including in his latest romantic tragicomedy “Fallen Leaves.” His 20th feature film is a continuation of what’s been dubbed his Proletariat Trilogy, following “Shadows in Paradise,” “Ariel, “and “The Match Factory Girl.” While each film follows similar plotting, Kaurismäki places a direct emphasis on his unique working-class characters and a humanistic worldview, despite the external harshness of the world around them.
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Leading the film with Kaurismäki’s trademark deadpan humor is Jussi Vatanen as Holappa, a metalworker who has found himself in a vicious cycle of depression caused by his alcoholism, which in turn, he blames on his depression. One night while accompanying his co-worker Huotari (Janne Hyytiäinen, “The Other Side of Hope”) out for a night of karaoke, he makes eyes with recently-fired grocery store worker Ansa (Alma Pöysti, “Tove”). However, neither is brave enough actually to speak to each other.
Ansa flits from underpaid to underpaid jobs, either working for cruel managers or small-time crooks. She barely makes enough money to keep the lights on in the flat she inherited from her grandmother. Her only entertainment is a radio that seems only to play devastating news about the Russian invasion of Ukraine or hopelessly melancholic torch songs. It’s easy to see how a spark, however slight, with another human being would have such an enormous impact on her.
Like a latter-day “Marty,” Kaurismäki has thrown these two sleepy people together and watches what happens when life in all its messiness seems hellbent on keeping them apart. Purposefully as clichéd as the love songs Holappa’s friend Huotari likes to sing at karaoke and Ansa listens to on the radio, Kaurismäki uses this seeming artifice to mine the raw emotions at their core. And to remind us why these kinds of songs have such power in the first place.
Similarly, Kaurismäki’s deadpan style gives Vatanen and Pöysti a blank canvas on which they can play out their emotional journeys with gestures and glances that, while small, are charged with such deep emotion. A small smile on Holappa’s face after a conversation with Ansa says more than any monologue could. Similarly, when Ansa, whose income remains unsteady, goes out of her way to buy a second-place setting to cook dinner for Holappa touched me deeply.
Although set contemporarily – made clear when the duo go on a date to see Kaurismäki’s America’s deadpan kindred spirit Jim Jarmuch’s “The Dead Don’t Die,” the filmmaker’s vision of Helsinki has not changed much from his early films. These two live and work in the margins, in service and construction jobs, keeping the city functioning for those in much better economic straits to enjoy. For them, it’s an industrial city, cold and often unfeeling – though not without its pleasures, like the karaoke joint or the movie theater. As is the case in many countries, the plight of the working class has not improved much over the last forty years and, in some cases, has worsened. Kaurismäki does not shy away from this truth.
But neither does he strand his characters merely in bleak tragedy. Rather, he operates from a place of hope. And so, as these two characters find a connection together, we see them grow and change internally, regardless of what their external conditions may be. Kaurismäki knows that true romance is when two people find this rare happiness together, despite everything. He knows that it is love that matters most, that hope is never fully lost, and that sometimes all it takes is one little spark to get the fire in a person’s life roaring again. [B+]
