Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki talks about new film Fallen Leaves
A hard-drinking metal worker in Aki Kaurismaki’s film Fallen Leaves may or may not be based on the eccentric filmmaker’s own experiences.
When Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall took out the Cannes Palme d’Or last year, many critics were hoping that Aki Kaurismaki’s Fallen Leaves would win the top gong. It was the Finnish director’s fifth film in the competition and one of his best – it won him the Jury Prize. He’d previously had success at Cannes in 2002 for The Man Without A Past, which won the festival’s Grand Prix.
Now, at the height of awards season, Triet’s heavily promoted film is having a field day, while the quieter Fallen Leaves – about a pair of 40-something Finnish workers who have mishaps as they try to find love – remains a favourite with critics.
Time magazine crowned it the best movie of 2023, calling it “a quiet masterpiece”, and praising Kaurismaki as a master of deadpan humanist comedy. In Finland, Fallen Leaves, Kaurismaki’s 20th film, has been his greatest box office success and it was on the shortlist for the Oscars in the international category, although it didn’t make the final cut.
When it comes to awards, it doesn’t help that the idiosyncratic Kaurismaki, 66, hardly promotes his films.
He attended his Cannes premiere and press conference but then left it mostly to his lead actors, Jussi Vatanen and Alma Poysti, to do the talking. Poysti was nominated for best actress in the Golden Globes and European Film Awards and attended both ceremonies.
“We were all moved that the audience had such a strong reaction,” she says in Cannes about the film’s world premiere there. “People told us that they were crying and laughing, and in spite of cultural or language differences. That’s the gift of Aki, that he can really speak in such a universal language to people everywhere. I think that’s the hardest thing you can do, especially with humour.”
The film has serious undertones, with Kaurismaki as always defending the lowly paid as they face unemployment. Vatanen plays a metal worker, Holappa, who has descended into alcoholism. Poysti’s supermarket employee, Ansa, remains defiant and will try her hand at anything, including washing dishes – something Kaurismaki once did himself. He also was a metal worker in his youth.
Fallen Leaves has been described as an additional fourth part to his working-class trilogy, after Shadows in Paradise, Ariel and The Match Factory Girl.
“Yes, it’s a fourth part of a trilogy, but perhaps people don’t know that a trilogy is only One, Two Three, which is also a Billy Wilder movie,” the director says.
Kaurismaki has a bookish knowledge of cinema and in his youth began by sitting in archives and film clubs and immersing himself in the works of cinematic masters like Godard, Truffaut, Bunuel, Bresson and Ozu – although he says he loves Chaplin the most. “Chaplin is still the best because he kept it simple,” he says.
He loves the classic American movies of the 1940s and ’50s and says David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) was a strong influence on Fallen Leaves. An old-school filmmaker, he shoots on film and has worked with the same crew since 1983.
“We don’t have to talk, we whistle,” he says, clearly referencing Lauren Bacall.
On the set he knows exactly what he wants and his actors are happy to comply, as Poysti recalls.
“‘Don’t look into the camera, don’t act too much. Know your lines, but don’t rehearse.’ The important thing was to come with an open heart and stay pure, stay honest. In the end he trusted us,” she says.
After meeting in a karaoke bar and struggling to reconnect, the protagonists in Fallen Leaves finally have their first date at an antiquated cinema resplendent with posters of some of Kaurismaki’s favourite films. They go to see The Dead Don’t Die by Jim Jarmusch, one of Kaurismaki’s good friends for whom he produced the Finnish section of 1991’s Night on Earth starring the late great Matti Pellonpaa.
“Jim was there yesterday (at the Fallen Leaves premiere) and he was almost crying which is rare for him,” Kaurismaki says.
At the press conference for Fallen Leaves, the auteur is as eccentric as ever, and at times it is difficult to know when he is joking and when he is telling the truth.
The big question is whether the ruddy-faced filmmaker and bar owner is still drinking and whether the heavy-drinking character in Fallen Leaves is based on himself.
“All I will say is it’s autobiographical,” he says.
“I stopped years ago. Until tomorrow.”
“You’ve stopped drinking?” the moderator asks. “Yeah, years ago,” he replies.
Vatanen comes to his aid.
“I have to say that I didn’t think too much about the alcoholic part of the character,” the actor says. “I was mainly concentrating on my lovely co-star. I had a special connection with her with help of Aki during the shooting and we thought of this as a romantic comedy.”
“Where is the comedy?” Kaurismaki retorts gruffly.
Such interactions are nothing like meeting the eccentric, loveable Finn in person. I first met him 30 years ago at the Karlovy Film Festival where we sat overlooking the town and imbibing the local rocket fuel, Becherovka.
He now says he is too tired to promote his films and he doesn’t fly, but he did grant an interview to a journalist from Portugal, where he and his wife and collaborator, Paula Oinonen, spend their winters.
Leading Portuguese critic Vasco Camara of Publico newspaper had lunch (fish, vegetables and no booze) with Kaurismaki and Oinonen in Matosinhos. He writes that the director was unsure why Fallen Leaves has been more successful in Finland than his previous films.
“It’s a film very similar to the others I’ve made, but the truth is that men have started watching my films which were previously seen more by female audiences. I think, being the portrait of an alcoholic, they thought there was something there for them this time… Now I go to a cafe, to the supermarket, and people laugh at me. Middle-aged Finnish couples also came to see one of my films for the first time.”
He has been accused of giving Finland a bad image “because I don’t show reindeer at sunset. I can’t do it any other way: I saw my first reindeer when I was 30.”
Canines, on the other hand, are of huge importance to Kaurismaki. Six of the couple’s dogs have appeared in their previous films, and this time it was their current dog Alma’s turn. to comfort Ansa in her loneliness, as a dog called Chaplin (what else?).
Kaurismaki: “My wife asks: ‘So what about the dog? ... This is our seventh dog, all the other six had roles in the films, why doesn’t this one?’ ... I had to write.”
He even gave Alma a loving plug in Cannes, explaining how they’d picked her up from the Portuguese streets.
“She was alone after one-and-a-half years on the road and she’d never seen a big city let alone cameras and lamps and 20 people in a small flat. She acted like an angel and I think she deserves the Palm Dog,” he says of the prize that is particular to Cannes and always causes quite a bit of fuss. The prize ultimately went to Snoop, the border collie in Anatomy of a Fall.
Ansa’s other company in Fallen Leaves is her vintage radio on which listens to newscasts about the Ukraine War.
Kaurismaki says “it felt like this bloody world needed some love stories now”, but he also that documenting the war was important for posterity, so that audiences could “watch it and understand how cruel and stupid the conflict was years down the line”. In the same way he had included the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1990’s The Match Factory Girl. Whether there will be a new film to reference the Israel-Gaza war remains to be seen.
Kaurismaki has made a film every two years for the past 40 years and says there will probably be one more before he retires.
“If I know myself well, in a few years I’ll be doing something,” he says.
In any case he had better keep his promise to his two actors from Fallen Leaves.
“He said he’s going to make a slapstick tragedy with us,” says Poysti. “So that’s in the works, but it’s still in his head.”
Which probably is quite the place to be.
Fallen Leaves opens in cinemas on February 14.
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