Aki Kaurismki, the deadpan cockeyed minimalist of Finland, has become the ultimate illustration of the principle that if you make movies in the same mood and style, with the same monosyllabic bombed-out hipster vibe, for a period of 30 years, your movies may not have changed but the world around them has, so the films will have a totally different effect.
In Fallen Leaves, the Kaurismki bauble thats showing at Cannes this year, theres actually a scene in which a character uses a computer. The films heroine, Ansa (Alma Pysti), loses her job as a supermarket worker, and to find another gig she rents an HP laptop at a makeshift Internet caf that charges 10 Euro for half an hour. Apart from that, the movie unfolds in that scruffy and sparsely decorated so-familiar-its-cozy pre-tech Kaurismki zone, where people still use electric adding machines or listen to a bulky kitchen radio that looks like its from the early 60s. Fallen Leaves is set in Helsinki, the capital of Finland, but to our eyes its a weirdly underpopulated place where shopping, as a pastime, doesnt exist, and neither, in any meaningful way, does conversation.
Lets go to karaoke, says a burly construction worker to Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), the films tall, taciturn, and functionally drunk romantic co-protagonist. Tough guys dont sing, he replies. A funny line, in that gnomic what-are-they-going-to-blurt-out-next? Kaurismki way (though the film could have used more of those lines). The two then head over to the California Pub, a bar thats like something out of East Berlin in the 70s with less mood lighting, and its there that Holappa meets Ansa. The two are drawn to each other, but in such a shy, recessive, shaggy-working-class-drone-with-nothing-to-say way that their shambling courtship makes Marty look like The Philadelphia Story.
How do we know that Ansa and Holappa are going to get together? Because they have matching auras of dour repressed sweetness. Because both actors look like lumpish proletarian versions of Ingmar Bergman stars Alma Pysti, radiant yet benumbed, plays Ansa like a dish-towel Bibi Andersson, and Jussi Vatanen could be the schlump brother of Max von Sydow (with a dollop of Ryan Gosling). Mostly, we know that theyre going to get together because thats all there is for them to do.
For their first date, they head to the local art theater to see Jim Jarmuschs The Dead Dont Die (an in-joke, since Kaurismki and Jarmusch have been nodding back and forth at each others styles for so long now that its hard to say who did what first). Then she invites him over for dinner, which requires a (rare) shopping expedition that incarnates Kaurismkis comedy of loneliness. She needs to stop by the store to purchaseanother dinner plate.
Ansas apartment is as sparely decorated as a monks garret, with a small flat bed, a couch that looks like she got it at Helsinki Goodwill, and that ancient radio, which blares nothing but reports about the war in Ukraine. The war is closer to home than it is for us; Finland is right on the border. But in Fallen Leaves, those dispatches, sober as they are, function with a kind of levity as the top layer of miserablism.
Speaking of sobriety, Holappas drinking turns out to be the films only conflict. Hes always got a flask or a half-pint bottle on him, and swigs from it all day, which is why he keeps getting fired. His alcoholism doesnt have to be explained; you see him at work, in his drudge stupor, and think, Id be drinking on that job too. But when Ansa catches him tippling from his flask in secret, she lets him know that he has a choice to make. Its got to be the drinking or her.
Ansa gets fired too, for handing out food thats past its sell-by date to a homeless person, and for taking an expired sandwich herself. (Its a bitter joke that supermarket protocol demanded for her to simply toss it all out.) The go-nowhere jobs are a preoccupation for Kaurismki. Its more than a social-political theme its the cornerstone of his romantic vision. His characters are the middle-class stragglers of industrial society, and now that theyve reached a certain age (hence the films title), if they cant fall in love what can they do? Not much. Sit around at home with a frozen dinner and a bottle of vodka.
Their predicament is humane and inviting, and Fallen Leaves, like every Kaurismki movie Ive seen, from Shadows in Paradise (1986) to The Match Factory Girl (1990) to his last film, The Other Side of Hope (2017), has a scruffy appeal. There are a couple of a rock n roll interludes at the bar, and these scenes do a good job of breaking up the gumdrop fatalism. Yet Id be lying if I didnt say that Im a bit baffled by the critical rapture that has greeted Fallen Leaves at Cannes. Its a nice but exceedingly minor movie. It leaves little imprint. What people are loving, I think, is the nostalgia thats now built into an Aki Kaurismki movie. In the age of fragmentation, his films that have never changed are like time-machine trips back to the quirky gusto of the 90s, when even an indie trifle dipped in Nordic despair could ripple, underneath it all, with optimism.