Last weekend Aki Kaurismäki’s long-awaited Kuolleet lehdet (“Fallen leaves”) got its Finnish premiere and came out as the biggest box-office hit of the Midnight Sun Film Festival history. I use the term “box office” reluctantly because the discourse that talks about cinema through money disgusts me. Nevertheless, this is a great indication of how important Aki Kaurismäki is for Finnish cinephiles and moviegoers, and how needed this kind of film is. Before the movie started, the director appeared with his dog Alma and let the audiences know that we were about to see the sleaziest film ever made. For an American director, this would have probably been a badge of honor and the hyperbole would have been part of the show. A Finnish director, on the other hand, means what he says.
Nevertheless, if this, what seems to be the greatest and the most important Finnish film of the 21st century, is the sleaziest film ever made, I’m not sure what it says about Finnish cinema. Many Finnish cinephiles are ready to claim that Aki Kaurismäki is the only good Finnish filmmaker to ever existed. Many Finnish people are also ready to claim their hatred for Aki’s fondness of dialogue expressed in the way Finnish is written in literature (furthermore in absurd sentences that are barely orthodox written language either) or how the actors in his films avoid psychological realism that is so dear to how Finnish people see “real cinema”. I’m also sure that somewhere in this group exists people who think that there is no way to make good Finnish cinema or that they themselves are the great saviors of a cinema that doesn’t really need saviors but writers who are willing to understand and outline what Finnish cinema in reality is, how it intertwines with Finnish life and what it has to tell us about ourselves. After all, I doubt it is possible for over a 100-year-old film culture to never have conceived a film that expresses how people thought, felt and simply existed.
But if there is a best bet. It is admittedly Aki Kaurismäki. Not necessarily better (whatever that means) than others but constantly more in touch with his times.
Finland in 2023 – contemporary political context behind the film
Fallen Leaves is releasing when Finland is getting one of the most right-wing and worker-hostile governments in its history. The government plan includes notable weakening of the rights of the workers, the poor, and immigrants, giving employers a chance to fire employees with nothing more reason than an “appropriate cause” (yes, in quotation marks and without other reasoning), penalizing and limiting the rights for “political” or supporting strikes, cutting heavily housing benefits and working on laws to force the unemployed to take whatever jobs are available at the cost of losing social security, raising taxes on already costly cinema and literature so that their consumption becomes impossible to low-income people, giving a chance to kick people of foreign nationality out of the country if their employment contract ends, establishing a similar citizen’s test as in the United States and requiring 40,000 euros yearly income as a requirement for citizenship, expanding local bargaining beyond collective labor contract, cutting heavily from environmental protection, selling critical government infrastructure to foreign investors, etc. These are just first tastes.
Fallen Leaves is a working-class romance set in 2024. One could say that Kaurismäki prophesized far-right government but that’s actually the development of a long-term shift from a welfare state to the neoliberal model that forsakes the Finnish experiment conceived by the war generation and embraces the cold capitalist models that are closer to those of the United States. Mind you, this isn’t just a small shift. It is a deliberately planned (revenge) attack to destroy the old system and turn the political system so far to the right that it will be unfixable. And in Finland, the government formations usually alternate so it doesn’t take a prophet to tell that after a relatively left-leaning government, a counterblow was coming. But if you listen to the rhetoric of the right-wing parties, “Let’s fix Finland”, you realize that these market economy fundamentalists are doing everything they can to give birth to a system where the rich will prosper and labor movements will be completely annihilated. In Finland, the dehumanizing culture based on capitalist logic has become and is becoming the norm. People are treated as an anonymous workforce whose humanity will be measured by their productivity. When one reads the political discussions and sees how these politicians are talking about immigrants, one realizes that it also means everyone else. The silent taboo is that you can talk worse about immigrants (or minorities like Sámi and Romani) who can’t or won’t vote than you can about ethnic Finns. But it takes only a person in denial to fail to see that behind this discourse lies a more profound and vile idea about humanity and culture.
Giving people their inherent worth – how Aki Kaurismäki sees human beings
Aki Kaurismäki has spoken about how we need love stories. By love stories, he doesn’t mean stories of escapism nor necessarily even stories about revolutions. He means that through love we can give human beings their inherent worth, we see them as they are and even how they could be. Because seeing the potential that someone has is also seeing how they are right now. The difference is between optimism and pessimism. During this age, politicians see people as tools and they talk like that too. To them, the potential of a person is in their productivity. Their unspoken belief is that only a few and rare have the potential enough to become something else (yet paradoxically they keep telling that everyone has an equal chance of becoming someone and an individual’s will decides). It’s not even pessimism, it’s cynicism. At the same time, it’s a political strategy that helps them to prevent themselves from acting human when they give harsh decisions for the people they only need to make profits. The logic of concentration camps is becoming the guiding logic in politics, except that as Hannah Arendt has noted, concentration camps weren’t work camps because labor was more efficient and more profitable through other means. Well, politicians have more resources and power than SS men.
The two loners of the film, Ansa (Alma Pöysti) and Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), are both struggling. They are constantly kicked out of their jobs and Holappa’s alcoholism stands in his way of creating meaningful, long-term relationships. But they see in each other something more. Kaurismäki never explains what draws them so tight together but once they have met, destiny seems to have other plans. One can imagine that they see behind each other’s simple exteriors, so intensively they stare at each other. Or perhaps in Kaurismäki’s films, the ideal image of a person is often the truest one despite people’s other shortcomings. Glances tell everything we need to know and it’s during these glances that his films are at their most powerful – admittedly thanks to Kaurismäki’s sense of cinematic rhythm as he knows how to time the close-ups for their maximum expressive power.
I caught the screening of Tulitikkutehtaan tyttö (“The Match Factory Girl”, 1990) on Saturday night (without sound, with a live musical performance by Maustetytöt duo who also performs in Fallen Leaves) and I was quite convinced that nobody could ever raise to Kati Outinen’s level. Then with the next day comes Fallen Leaves and its star Alma Pöysti is exactly as mesmerizing presence, embodying so much with her silent facial expressions while at another turn delivering lines in perfect Kaurismäki fashion, giving them weight and significance beyond the immediate dramatic moment. Similarly, Jussi Vatanen, a famous TV face and a star in many popular comedies, is finally given a chance to represent the people and live the archetypical role of a melancholic Finnish man to its fullest. He is actually an artist whose performances have always hidden this role even when his directors weren’t as talented as Kaurismäki. A native Finn can indeed watch this film and realize almost instantly why this surprising choice of an actor had the honor to become the other protagonist of the most important Finnish film of the century. Yes, it’s again the question of potential.
Love and War – Kaurismäki and the Evils of the World
The love between these two people is the guiding principle of the film and only the possible loss of hope is casting a shadow over their meeting. They have a lot to fear: unemployment, exploitation, alcoholism, and war. Especially the last one is a constant presence in the film and every time a radio opens, one can expect terrifying news of Russia’s terrorism against the people of Ukraine. I wish I could write more about this but it would require going into specifics of the film and I want to avoid that. There is one scene especially where the whole futility of war, the collective over-generational trauma of the Winter War, and all the repressed anger are felt profoundly. The question of whether Kaurismäki exploits the war for sentimental purposes is useless. The cold repetition of a news program generates a sense of helplessness to the point that I’m sure Kaurismäki would be almost ready to accept accusations that he is taking the war into the film without any particular purpose but to express that he is afraid and almost every Finn is afraid, helpless and angry for the devastation Ukrainians have to go through. One line is used to comment on the war and that’s it. But it might be one of the most powerful lines of all time in Finnish cinema.
Even with this sense of threat, the power of love is constantly trying to become the guiding principle of the universe. Ultimately one realizes that war is too much but because it is every day for Finnish people on this psychological level, Kaurismäki cannot avoid it if he wants to stay true to what life is like in today’s Finland. Glimpses of hope appear in the form of the saving of a dog, a moment of solidarity between co-workers, and persistence between Ansa and Holappa. As sharply as always, Kaurismäki finds the core of his film in the way extreme misery and small moments of humanity oscillate. One interesting trait of his work appears in that the bad things in his films are always too big for the people, they happen on an overwhelming scale, but the good things are small yet more meaningful than the bad ones. That’s why Kaurismäki also prefers the minimalistic and condensed expression to the epic or spectacular. If something bad happens to a human being or affects them, trying to show this often large and abstract thing in images of the same scale is meaningless. He must show the human being because that is the only way we can actually understand anything. Why show lines of unemployed people when the face of someone who is going through this is enough? In The Match Factory Girl, Kaurismäki uses footage from the news but that’s as far as he goes. Even then, it’s the screen of the television that offers proportions. But hurt and disappointed Kati Outinen looking out of the window in that film is more expressive of human suffering than the spectacular images of the TV could ever be.
Frozen in time – how the film navigates between the past, present, and the future
At this point, one more comment about the film’s sense of time is required. I wrote a little about proportions but Kaurismäki has never been particularly realistic or interested in showing Finland exactly as it looks. Still, he gets to the bottom of what it really is. The locations of the film are all over Helsinki and their rugged appearances give an impression of a city that has been frozen in time. Indeed, we could see exactly similar sights in his films of the 1980s or 1990s. That is probably the most important observation when it comes to the way the “past” is shown in this film.
Another realization is the fact that the film is set in 2024 which I wrote about in the beginning when I was outlining some of the political context of the film. This vision of the future comes from those big lines of political development that have been visible for some time, that is the decline from the welfare state and through the recession of the 1990s toward a neoliberal hellhole. It’s also important to see that the political discourse has become more violent and authoritarian in a brief period back in the 2010s with the far-right populist Finns Party emerging as one of the biggest parties in Finland and setting new (low) standards on how to talk about immigration or the EU. In the Finnish context, it is also essential to mention the biggest party of Finland, the National Coalition Party which has been constantly shifting towards populism with a more far-right-leaning populist faction taking over the liberal faction. Similar developments have happened all over Europe with a prime example of the UK, Hungary, and Poland or more recently Italy. Nevertheless, it’s not exactly a prophetic vision to say that things are more than likely getting worse in this regard with the National Coalition Party and Finns Party forming the biggest parties of the government coalition (also including conservative Christian Democrats and more liberal Swedish People’s Party of Finland). The vision of the future in Kaurismäki’s film is also based on the worst fears and experiences of the last right-wing government headed by Juha Sipilä which was catastrophic for the welfare state and the poorest layers of the society.
With this in mind, when we put the vision of the past and the future together, we get the sense of a Finland that is never truly changing. Because Kaurismäki is always focused on the lives of the people on the margins of society, including the working class, it is more precise to notice that this means that the life of these people seems never-changing in his films. The only part of the film that really reminds the viewer how Finland of 2023 looks is the interior of the supermarket – even its backyard is straight from Kaurismäki’s timeless Finland.
But all of the film’s concerns draw from the way Finland is right now, from the exploitation of workers to the shadow of Russia’s war on Ukraine. That is also precisely why Fallen Leaves feels so overwhelming. It admits its fears freely while trying to hold on to things that generate hope, similar to many ordinary Finnish people reading the government’s notes. There is nothing in the film’s vision of the future that doesn’t already exist at this moment, the only thing is that the events of the film have more weight because they are envisioned in the film’s world to last beyond this moment (most notable in the fact that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is still going on).
Since Fallen Leaves premiered on Saturday 17th of June in Sodankylä and the plans of the new government were heard on the 16th, it becomes without further planning an essential work in that it depicts the biggest and most terrifying adolescence modern Finland is going through. The backbone of the politics of the film is strong but its specifics are only indicative. Nevertheless, it’s impossible not to interpret the film from this political moment. This is also the brilliance of Aki Kaurismäki. His films reflect the present in a relatively free way and he doesn’t direct the viewer’s interpretation to one place in particular. The only definitive thing is his humanism and concern for the people. Aki Kaurismäki has accepted the artist’s responsibility for the world better than many others whose love for making films is somewhere closer to obsession or vanity. If society is unfair, he must make a film about it. There is nothing else that would explain his return at the time of Russia’s attack on Ukraine or when Finland is abandoning the national dreams of its post-war generation.
Wider distribution in Finland from the 15th of September.
Berto-Kenyon 
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