Nordic Cinema - Kaurismaki's Fallen Leaves

A screening Bby the Finnish Embassy and EUNIC Malaysia

Modestly scaled and tonally perfect, “Fallen Leaves” opens in a fluorescent hell-on-earth and ends with a vision of something like paradise. In between, there are lonely nights, fleeting joys, ordinary degradations, laborious work, karaoke reveries, many cigarettes and more drinks. A lot of the drinks are downed hurriedly and often furtively by a man, while elsewhere a woman listens to sad songs. Outwardly, these two are leading lives of quiet desperation, though because this is an Aki Kaurismaki movie, their despair comes with great comic timing.

A Finnish writer-director best known on the international festival circuit (“Fallen Leaves” won a major award at the Protected content , Kaurismaki makes movies — precise, austere, plaintive — that resist compartmentalization. Since the early Protected content , he has honed his minimalist visual style and quietly ironic sensibility -the movies are sometimes described as bittersweet.

Set in Helsinki, “Fallen Leaves” opens on the woman who listens to sad songs; it’s a habit that suggests she’s a familiar genre type — she isn’t. A supermarket worker of indistinct age and few smiles, Ansa (Alma Poysti) is impassively restocking some shelves when you first see her. It’s a vivid tableau of everyday banality complete with listless customers, unflattering lighting and the rhythms of alienated labor.
- New York Times

Protected content