Fallen Leaves (2023)

This film was part of the Chicago International Film Festival

Love is not an easy road to travel; no genre knows that better than a tragic comedy. In Fallen Leaves or Kuolleet lehdet, lit. ‘Dead Leaves,’ the story focuses on grocery store clerk Ansa, which means trapped. She is quite literally trapped because she works at a dead job and can barely pay her rent. One night, she goes out and meets the equally lonely Holappa. Holappa Is employed at a factory job and is an alcoholic. He spends a lot of time with his only work friend and drinks and smokes, but both Ansa and Holappa find common ground in the mediocrity of life and slowly support each other through it.

The director of this film, Aki Kaurismäki, says this film is about lonely people with baggage. I think the director is correct. The problem is only one of the two people in the relationship fully demonstrates their baggage. The most I can come up with for baggage regarding the female lead is that she is poor and hates it. This completely contrasts Holappa, who seems to have a careless disregard for life until he meets Ansa. The tragedy of this comedy is that because they have such opposing lifestyles in terms of what they do for fun, it’s tough for them to meet in the middle. The comedy is supposed to come from that profound misunderstanding. Still, none of that humor is clear other than in conversational dialogue with people both characters care about outside of each other. Living a broken life is not a new concept. I wish audiences could see how both Ansa and Holappa rebounded from the desperate circumstances they faced when the film began. In my mind, recovery is more critical than tragedy, and the film fails on multiple levels to showcase that evolution, except for Holappa.

The main reason to like this movie is that even though it’s slow, the dialogue can be amusing, and because the dialogue is as sharp as it is, it pulls the story along. The slow pace may take you out of the story, but the characters working to figure themselves out keep you in it. I can honestly say I’ve never come across a movie like that. Having seen it, I wouldn’t know that it’s one of my favorite experiences in a movie theater because it takes too long to get to the point. I don’t necessarily even wanna see Ansa date Holappa Because the dynamic feels unequal. The exciting thing about foreign films is that sometimes they can teach you more about yourself than they can teach you in the story you’re watching. Maybe that’s the film’s greatest strength. All I can say is that I did not fall in love with this movie The way I wanted to, and I’m OK with that, even if that may be an unpopular opinion. At least the filmmaker tried to find love in broken people, and that’s a rare thing to even search for in the first place, so the film gets a very shallow recommendation.