I caught AFI’s last-minute addition of Fallen Leaves, the Cannes Palme d’Or Jury Prize winner, and Finland’s Best International Feature Film entry at the 96th Academy Awards. The film is billed as a comedy-drama, but it leans far more into the latter, the humour being fairly dry or dark, which I appreciated.
Finland has landed the #1 spot for the happiest country in the world for 6 years running in the World Happiness Report, but you’d never suspect that from the characters you meet at the beginning of the film. Ansa (played by Alma Pöysti) works at a supermarket stocking shelves under the watchful eyes of security until she’s fired for taking an expired item after her shift, though, she has good friends who quit in solidarity with her. Holappa (played by Jussi Vatanen) works a union construction job but is an alcoholic, he will eventually lose this job too, but not before his and Ansa’s paths cross a few times and show mutual attraction.
The pair’s paths keep serendipitously crossing despite poor communication. Part of that is because the timeline of the film is unclear. When Ansa goes to give her phone number, she doesn’t do so with her cell phone but with paper and pencil. In fact, the conversations in the film seem to all take place on landlines. Rather than television, Ansa gets her news from an old-fashioned radio, but it is the news of the 2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine. And when the pair go to the cinema, they are seeing The Dead Don’t Die (2019), while this could have been a repertoire cinema, it seemed more likely to just be yet another thing to indicate the timeline isn’t right, or it’s an alternate reality. Perhaps one where Finland never landed the #1 spot for the happiest country in the world, though I prefer to think that even in the happiest country, there are still people dealing with the same issues Ansa and Holappa deal with, working jobs that care more about policy than people or battling personal demons.
Ansa seemed very aware of the fact that Holappa had a drinking problem from their very first coffee date, having seen evidence of it prior, but it wasn’t until she invited him back to her place that she put her foot down about his drinking, because of her history with it. This part of the film didn’t make sense to me. She couldn’t have known how he would react to her bringing up his problem, and she did it in a space where they were all alone rather than when they were in public, like outside of the theatre, before she invited him over. It felt wildly unsafe to me, and it was at that moment I wondered if the film was written by a man. I saw the credits but the name read as non-gendered to me and I was unfamiliar with their work, Fallen Leaves is written and directed by Aki Kaurismäki, a man, whose last film was The Other Side of Hope (2017).
The audience got a big laugh when Ansa took home a stray from her new job and washed it, and an even bigger one when it was staring at her while she slept. This was one of my favourite parts of the film because it was very real. She was seeking companionship with this guy, but then she ended up finding it with a dog, and very good solid companionship. I know many people who have chosen pets over partners and it is a valid life choice.
Most of the overt humour in the film comes courtesy of the pair’s friends, particularly Holappa’s friend Huotari (played by Janne Hyytiäinen), who incites their meeting with some karaoke, very insistent on the quality of his voice. His instance that someone will discover him and that he’s younger than he is, work because the Hyytiäinen is very game.
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