Movie Review: 'Fallen Leaves' is One of the Best of 2023

Fallen Leaves (2023)

Directed by Aki Kaurismaki

Written by Aki Kaurismaki

Starring Alma Poysti, Jussi Vatanan

Release Date November 17th, 2023

Published December 18th, 2023

Continuing to catch up on movies of 2023, I've recently had the pleasure to enjoy Alice Rohrwacher's La Chimera, Kelly Reichardt's Showing Up, and Justine Triet's engrossing, Anatomy of a Fall. I've still got a few titles to go but I'm making great progress toward my best of 2023 list. The hard part is going to be having so many great movies to decide between. It would honestly be easier this year to create a top 20 but nevertheless. Making my end of year list is a joy, even as I will have to wrestle with where to put Aki Kaurismaki's new movie Fallen Leaves on my list. Fallen Leaves is a lovely, sincere, slice of life drama set among the poor of modern Finland.

Ansa (Alma Poysti) lives a solitary single life in a tiny apartment in Finland. She survives mostly on taking home out of date food from her job at a local grocery store. Sadly, she will soon lose that job. An over zealous security guard sees her letting another poor person take some out of date food that she was throwing in a dumpster. As she's leaving work, the security guard and an officious store manager make her empty her bag and inside they find a piece of expired food that was to be her dinner that night. She's fired on the spot and two of her co-workers choose to quit in solidarity. They too had been taking expired food to survive on.

In a parallel story, Holappa (Jussie Vatanan) is working a menial job cleaning rust off of metal with a high powered hose. It's just him standing and spraying for endless job. It's mind numbing and to cope with the dreariness of the job, Holappa has developed a drinking problem. He hides a bottle near his work station and regularly grabs a swallow in between spraying pieces of metal. As you can imagine, this won't last. Eventually, Holappa will get caught drinking on the job and he will be fired. Before that happens however, Holappa meets Alma and in a world of dreary, lonely, desperation, the two find a bit of a spark.

Holappa buys Ansa a cup of coffee and takes her to a movie, things she could not do on her own as she's still looking for a new job. His kindness is touching and their tentative flirtation is sweet. The film even gives them a romantic comedy complication as Alma promises to tell Holappa her name if they go on a second date. She gives him her number and he loses it, and that sets up the rest of their story together. It's a complication that would be just as at home in a Hollywood rom-com but it feels more meaningful and heartbreaking in the context that writer-director Aki Kaurismaki places it in.

Two sad, lonely people struggling at the bottom of the economic ladder find each other and give each other comfort only to seemingly lose their one chance of finding comfort in a cold and uncaring world, that's poetry. Great art from great sadness. Kaurismaki doesn't inflate the importance of this moment, if anything, it's merely just an incident on our way to somewhere else in this story. The brilliance of Kaurismaki is using something as simple as a rom-com complication and using it to magnify the sadness and heartache, and the poignant striving of his characters in a way that feels honest.

You watch Fallen Leaves and your heart rises and falls as you just want these poor characters to have some sort of joy. Their life is not all sadness, they've found their own comforts, healthy and unhealthy, but together they could perhaps build a life that is less sad simply because they have each other. I was on the edge of my seat for a moment as Holappa dropped that phone number and I was immersed in his wandering in her neighborhood hoping he might run into her and get a second chance. The movie then cuts back to Ansa and she's convinced he just wasn't that into her and you want to reach through the screen and tell her what really happened.

Kaurismaki isn't done with the familiar Hollywood romance however as there is one more complication that I will not spoil here. The film grows in my estimation the more I think about it. The cinematography recalls classic Hollywood, as in, it looks like a slightly modernized version of a 1950's Hollywood romance shrunk down to the proportions of two poor people in modern Finland. That's incredible. It blows my mind how Kaurismaki uses classic films as the basis to tell a story among people who are not glamorous, they are of an achingly human proportion as opposed to the Gods and Goddesses who brought these familiar romantic elements to life at the movies.

That, to me, is the magic of the movies. As Roger Ebert said "Movies are like a machine that makes empathy." Kaurismaki's empathy for the poor of Finland, his empathy for those struggling through the war in Ukraine, his care for people in general, radiates from his work. He has a wealth of empathy and uses his art to spread that empathy and create it within others. That's why movies like Fallen Leaves are so marvelous. Here is a movie from Finland that is reaching into the hearts and minds of people around the world and creating empathy.

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