This Finnish romantic comedy was very unexpected yet heartfelt, and by the time I finished watching it, I couldn’t name a single emotion I was feeling. I would say it goes through a rollercoaster of emotions, except its muted tone throughout the majority of the film prevents it from going through the epic highs and lows of typical melodramas. It’s set in the city of Helsinki, following the everyday lives of Ansa, a depressed grocery store worker, and Holappa—also depressed—who works at a construction site.
The best way to describe this movie is a typical meet-cute, but depression edition. The story has all the classic elements of sappy cheesy romance that I love: eyes meeting over dimly lit karaoke, tragic miscommunication, and grand orchestral music playing in the background. However, this is all contrasted with its extremely plain setting, which, for me, elevated the romance even more. The two characters work unfulfilling jobs by day and eat lonely TV dinners by night, with melancholy shots of silent bus rides scattered throughout. Holappa never even learns Ansa’s name for the entirety of the movie, and their first date is almost painfully silent and awkward, but it honestly all feels very endearing somehow.
Most romance movies, although enjoyable, don’t really leave me with any new perspectives on life because they feel too grand and unrealistic for my own standards. “Fallen Leaves” manages to leave me with the same kicking my feet under the covers and blushing kind of mood that a good rom-com always provides, along with more mellow reflections on the importance of human connection and whatnot. I don’t really want to sound too pretentious at this point, but maybe that’s just an unfortunate side effect of trying to review a movie while trying to maintain a semi-serious tone instead of my usual keyboard smashes on Letterboxd.
My main takeaway from “Fallen Leaves” is that we can’t expect romance and other people to save us, but it makes life and all its difficulties infinitely more bearable. Kaurismaki makes it clear that the larger unhappy circumstances of Ansa and Holappa’s lives lie outside of their control. Things like war and alcoholism are problems that can’t be glossed over by any amount of cute cafe dates or dramatic love confessions, no matter how hard we want them to. A lot of times, a cliche happily ever after seems like the easy cure to all human maladies, and of course I like to indulge in this fantasy every once in a while, but life is obviously a lot more complicated than that. The characters still have many of the same problems that they started with at the beginning of the movie after they meet one another and strike up a romance, but they do start to smile more. This juxtaposition between unchanging material conditions and the characters’ emotional growth despite it all struck a wonderful balance between acknowledging the hopelessness that comes from unsolvable existential situations (like trying to figure out what I want to do after finishing school, hahaha) and highlighting the ways that a connection with another person can make this hopelessness feel lighter.
I recommend “Fallen Leaves”to fellow romance fans who are looking for something ordinary and low-key but still tender. And no spoilers, but the last fifteen minutes will have you shocked and stunned beyond belief.
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