Fallen Leaves: Reviving Dead Souls

MOVIE INFO- ROTTEN TOMATOES

In modern-day Helsinki, two lonely souls in search of love meet by chance in a local karaoke bar. However, the pair’s path to happiness is beset by numerous obstacles — from lost numbers to mistaken addresses, alcoholism, and a charming stray dog.

Reviews :

Aki Kaurismaki has a visual style all his own that reflects how he dips between extremes in an absurd but fluid way. I see it as a deadpan, hyperbolic technicolor, profusion of ennui and hidden joy.

Fallen Leaves is probably Kaurismaki’s most stylistic and tonally perfect film. The movie starts off in a hellscape of both labor and consumer consumption. There’s fleeting visions of joy being dangled, but otherwise just medium degradation, unfulfilling monotonous work, karaoke Fridays, cigarettes and liquors. It’s ending is the heaven on earth its two lovers desire and deserve. The middle space is occupied by absolute loneliness- drinking for the man, sad songs and despairing war news on the radio for the woman. It’s deadpan, Buster Keaton antics executed with a heavy dose of ennui and comic timing. Everyone seems stuck in the drollest comedy ever made. If Kaurismaki and Jim Jarmusch weren’t such good friends irl they would be cinematic Siamese twins. Fallen Leaves is Kaurismaki’s twentieth film.

The two lovers here are both waiting for fate to connect them, the complications to work themselves out, so they can break out of the gray prison they exist in. When both get fired from assorted jobs their inexpressiveness becomes a form of dignified resistance= their opportunity for a jailbreak. Their connection is emphasized obliquely, through parallel editing and situations, visual similarities, idiosyncratic juxtapositions, taciturn interactions, friendly barbed insults, and some often long and awkward pauses. It’s as if the two are silently, emotionally negotiating the rules of how each will exist in each other’s personal space. They’re so low key emotionally, caged inside, that vibrant color shifts, film posters and song lyrics function as emotional stand-ins, expressing what they can’t yet say. By withholding on screen emotion Ksurismaki is letting the audience discover the characters, fall in love with them.