A Serendipitious Love Story by Kaurismäki: Fallen Leaves (2023)

Aki Kaurismäki is one of the biggest names in modern-to-contemporary European cinema because of the sheer number of brilliant films that the Finnish director has raised in the name of art, cinema, and humanity. His 2023 film Fallen Leaves is one of his most recent and soulful pieces of art which expresses the two lonely and low-class workers’ fluttering in what seems to be an unlikely prospect of love. Both Ansa and Holappa—whose name we do not learn until the ending sequences of the film—are somewhat awkward, unresponsive, and reticent. Their mutual personalities are heavily expressed in the film through their actions and interactions with each other as well as with the outside world and stimuli.

Ansa lives alone and initially can be seen to be employed in a supermarket. Like most people who can be called somewhat bereft of higher education, she is highly prone to being fired or quitting their jobs—which both Ansa and Holappa do throughout the movie: Ansa changes her job three times while Holappa twice in the film. Moreover, the house Ansa resides through the runtime of the film is extremely modest and is bequeathed to her by a relative. In her solitary confinement, her pastime after work is often depicted as simply listening to the radio or going out with her friend.  

Similarly, Holappa also works as a blue-collar worker at an industrial job site, though he gets fired twice from two other companies because of his alcohol abuse during work hours. As it can be inferred that Holappa struggles heavily from the consequences of alcohol, this, in turn, tides most of the misfortunes on his way.  

The setting of the film, urban Finland, is portrayed as extremely melancholic and depressive to the point that it is impossible to be unresponsive and unaffected by the bleak horrors of loneliness and misery. The impossible odds of Ansa and Holappa making their ambiguous connection, or relation, is presented to the audience in the form of visual stimuli, persuading you to conjecture their happiness—or end of their loneliness—to be almost a utopic scenario. Only at the end of the film that we observe a bright and lively Finnish environment in which Ansa, Holappa, and Chaplin—the dog Ansa adopts after finding it in her workplace—and their future could be determined to lead toward a happy ending contrary to a funereal atmosphere that we had been ingesting throughout the runtime of the film. 

The primary conflict of the film is the obstacles surrounding the relationship between Ansa and Holappa. Their fates had coincided once to posit an optimistic outlook for the future, but similarly, both the internal and external agents of fate are observed to be working against the lonely pair’s advantage as their connection and reachability are never stable. Losing Ansa’s number and Holappa’s endearment of alcohol almost tears their love (?) asunder (Ansa has traumatic past experiences with alcohol usage in her family, losing three family members on a similar path that Holappa is treading, and this causes her to cope with another alcohol misfortune by avoiding and distancing herself from Holappa. This, however, does not last long as he quits alcohol altogether in order to win Ansa back). Moreover, on the way to meet with Ansa, Holappa gets hit by a train, another inauspicious element of fate.

An unlike, and somewhat odd, story of love, affection, and loneliness, Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves (2023) is a slow-paced and hard-to-digest romantic drama, and not without with poignancy and beauty of human interaction and connection. Two misfortunate and miserable souls, by the agents of fate, have coincided their paths and decided to take action in regards to dismantling their desperate loneliness. By the glistering horizon in the ending scene, we can assert the idea that they have achieved their desires and relinquished their solitude by accompanying one another.