Distinctive Visual Language
Fallen Leaves, in a clean, economic stream of images follows these two characters, their individual lives, the knocking together of them and the brief spat. As always with Kaurismäki, they come together in a sweet knot that does not feel final, yet feels resolved — a charming incompleteness — like a circle that hasn’t been closed exactly; an almost-ness that haunts the happiness with which the film closes. Though his films are known to be “funny” the humour is always so wrapped up in Finnish comportments it is as subtle as silence itself.
Throughout the film, in the background, as radio announcements, we can hear the escalating war of Russia in Ukraine, something Ansa keeps shutting after listening to it for a moment or two — how much falling apart of the world can a person falling apart endure? Odd, since in the theatre they are watching Jim Jarmusch The Dead Don’t Die, a 2019 film. Are we, then, in the present? Why are radios so prevalent? Where are the iPhones? What is this contemporary moment that Finland is inhabiting? Or, perhaps, the question is, what is this contemporary moment that Kaurismäki’s Finland is inhabiting? Timeless is, perhaps, too trite a word to describe a world so touched by the present moment, and yet hovering uneasily, gracefully, over it.
Stitched along with ‘Mambo Italiano’, Finnish Romantic Nationalism and the regular Rock And Roll, the images are culled from Timo Salminen’s camera — he has shot every Kaurismäki film, from the 1981 documentary on the Finnish local music scene — which lights spaces and faces theatrically, with a sharp, chalky clarity even in the deepest dusks. Sometimes you are looking at a frame, where just their faces are lit, pale and porcelain, and wonder, where is the light coming from? They almost resemble apparitions.
The thing about Kaurismäki’s movies, of which Fallen Leaves is an exemplar, is their incredibly singular and distinctive visual aesthetic — the still, staged frames bursting with hard colour and soft intention, the deadpan delivery, the minimalist furniture, the single painting on the wall — which aids his singular and distinctive desire — that is to tell stories of alienated people, in a crumbling city, finding love.
An image, then, from the film, of Ansa buying a plate and cutlery for Holappa’s visit, becomes emblematic of this alienation from and, simultaneously, the aspiration for companionship — that she only has one plate, one pair of cutlery at her home; that, over the course of the film, another set would be stacked alongside, both scratched at from use, for years and years. That is the hope, anyway.