Finnish arthouse darling Aki Kaurismäki is neither the first renowned director to return from self-imposed “retirement” (Miyazaki, Soderbergh, Lynch), nor will he be the last (Tarantino).  What’s funny about the six-years-later follow-up to his announced “retirement” film The Other Side of Hope is that Kaurismäki has not returned for some grand, career-defining statement that shakes the foundation of everything he made in his heyday (The Boy and the Heron, Twin Peaks: The Return).  He simply just made another Aki Kaurismäki movie.  Everything I’ve written previously about Kaurismäki classics like Shadows in Paradise and The Match Factory Girl could easily be copied & pasted into a review of his comeback picture, Fallen Leaves.  So, I’m just going to go for it.  It looks like “a Polaroid in motion.”  It totally nails “the absurd indignities of modernized labor & urban living.”  It’s got everything you could possibly want from a Kaurismäki film: “the carefully curated visuals, the low-key absurdist humor, the fixation on the embarrassing exploitations of entry-level labor.”  He’s maybe the most consistent, unsurprising director around, and yet each individual film is so thoroughly, methodically lovely that he keeps getting away with it.  Every Aki Kaurismäki movie is another refresher on why he is one of the greatest; Fallen Leaves is just the latest.

If there’s any late-career reflection on the director’s previous work here, it’s all in the background.  One of the film’s central locations is a Helsinki arthouse movie theater plastered with posters advertising an assortment of New Hollywood, French New Wave, and genre schlock classics, suggesting Kaurismäki has spent time pondering where he fits in the grand, ongoing conversation that is cinema.  You will not believe which Jarmusch film he plucks from that conversation to illustrate the confusion.  Otherwise, he just sticks to the usual script.  Fallen Leaves is a low-key, high-charm love story about two pitifully lonely people struggling to make room for each other’s messes in their small, tidy lives.  They’re cute together, but it takes a while to make the pieces to fit.  One hands the other their phone number, and it’s immediately lost.  One is an alcoholic, while the other is hurt by their family’s history with the disease.  One adopts a pet, while the other suffers a horrific accident.  Their parallel lives in Helsinki are soundtracked by throwback rock ‘n roll karaoke and radio news broadcasts covering the Russian-Ukrainian war.  Eventually their missed connections and self-guarding defenses recede long enough for them to meet on the right page.  It’s sweet, even though the world around them can be so sad & cruel.  It’s like finding love in real life.

I can’t confidently say where Kaurismäki’s work fits in the grand conversation of cinema, mostly because his artistic statements remain so intimately personal & self-contained.  In in the interest of keeping things small & tidy, it’s much easier to hear where Fallen Leaves chimes in on the cinema of this year in particular.  It fits neatly in two of 2023’s more rewarding trends: established directors excelling just by playing the hits (Anderson, Coppola, Haynes) and Mubi absolutely killing it in curating their festival acquisitions (The Five Devils, Passages, Rimini).  It also fits neatly in Kaurismäki’s larger catalog: modest, tidy, uncluttered, expressive only in its primary colors and Tati-styled visual gags.  He’s the kind of director who makes people say, “Once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.”  Only, every time you watch one you find yourself thinking “I really need to see them all.” 

-Brandon Ledet