“Fallen Leaves” records a lasting love letter to the movies and to romantic well-being

Aki Kaurismäki’s latest brisk, endearing feature screens at UW Cinematheque on July 4.

Madison can’t quite get the season right for Aki Kaurismäki’s brisk autumnal feature, Fallen Leaves (2023). It premiered locally at the AMC Fitchburg 18 in early January 2024, and is now returning for a one-time peak summer screening at UW Cinematheque, on July 4, at 7 p.m. But that’s OK; appreciation needn’t precisely synchronize with the current climate, especially for the endearing, hopeful romance between supermarket stocker Ansa (Alma Pöysti) and construction worker Holappa (Jussi Vatanen).

After 40 years, Finnish writer-director Kaurismäki is still a steadfast visionary, sketching wholesome misfit characters whose empathy mirrors his own empathy for the working class. Many English-speaking audiences’ introduction to him may have stemmed from the unofficial “proletariat trilogy,” originally released between 1986 and 1990, and packaged in a slim Criterion Eclipse set in 2008. Writer Jordan Cronk actually places Fallen Leaves within its echelon, arguing that this latest film is a buoyant, 30-plus-year-belated addition that matches the sanguine passion of Kaurismäki’s breakthrough and first “proletariat” entry, Shadows In Paradise (1986).

In today’s cinematic landscape of rather dire, meandering epics, Fallen Leaves is quite simple in narrative terms: two solitary souls notice each other one night and, by second-chance encounter, develop deeper kinship. And yet within that 81-minute framework, Kaurismäki nestles a technologically and decoratively anachronistic tale with wistful touches, his first feature since “returning” from retirement. Leaves gradually resembles a love letter to Chaplin’s City Lights (1931), one of the most revered melodramas of all time. But it’s also an approachably deadpan dramedy about both the direct and indirect role of cinema in our lives, and the kind of togetherness it fosters that’s often under-recognized as we receptively sit in the dark staring at a story-high silver screen.

The former Ritz cinema in Helsinki is the site of flourishing feelings in Fallen Leaves, as Ansa and Holappa watch Jim Jarmusch’s zombie satire, The Dead Don’t Die (2019). This cheeky choice—in a movie-house plastered with legacy posters for features like The Killers (1964), L’Argent (1983), and Brief Encounter (1944)—facilitates the connection between Leaves‘ two characters, who share a pithy conversation about it afterwards. Further, it contributes to the movie lore between the two seasoned directors over the decades. (See the final, Helsinki-set vignette of Jarmusch’s 1991 taxi-cab anthology, Night On Earth, for starters.)

When Kaurismäki isn’t establishing literal cinematic constructs, he thematically revises a customary subject in his characters’ lives: drinking. Imbibing at the local watering hole, at dinner, or even on the job always seems to prominently turn up in his screenplays, which makes Fallen Leaves‘ turn seem all the more radical. Kaurismäki flips the script on its representation and character redemption. Here, it’s in the case of feigning tough-guy Holappa, who, in a bar early on, admits he’s depressed because he drinks (err…is it the other way around?, his witticism recalling a famous Leaving Las Vegas line). Before it plagues his ability to keep things steady and safe at a construction site, Ansa openly reveals to him that members of her family have died as a result of alcoholism. She asks that he sober up for their sake, knowing what the future could hold for the two strong, silent types.

As someone who gravitated to the pure act (and later art) of writing in his teens as a result of having to deal with traumatic or vexing familial issues that almost always concerned abusive drinking, I find that Holappa’s gesture to Ansa—pouring his remaining bottles of booze down a sink drain—holds an especially stirring personal meaning. The action is clothed in an overarchingly light tone that avoids even a glimmer of dramatic didacticism. Instead of drifting into an overwrought reunion, Fallen Leaves wishes its characters well in building a life together. It’s perhaps the most universally essential message a modest film can impart, especially in the fourth drunkest city in the drunkest state in the nation. Maybe when we’re feeling resigned or down on our luck, the movies can teach us something about the essence of bonding and affection that grabbing a drink can’t.