Movie Review: Falling Leaves (2023) Dual Moods With Disrupture :)
Hi!
I've seen Falling Leaves with Chrys last night. What a piece of cinematography!
Here's what I think, if you got a few minutes:
This movie by Aki Kaurismäki, "Falling Leaves," is both dystopian and utopian in equal measure. It's both political and poetic. His minimalism recalls silent films, the frames are magnetic, the casting brilliant, the spleen absolute. Life is a series of absurd events and encounters, love is both madness and despair, and what is easy for some is devilishly contorted and complicated for others. Just when you think the world will shatter before your eyes into a thousand pieces, something saves it: an almost otherworldly innocence. Kaurismäki's dark humor is fabulous. The final image: with a woman, Chaplin the dog, and a man on crutches shuffling along behind them, contains both the sadness and beauty of life.
We were at a friend's house last evening and he suggested or asked if we want to watch a movie, all of us, about 12 guests (all movie lovers!). We asked which one and we found out. So we told ourselves that a meeting with a new film by Aki Kaurismäki is not to be missed. Especially since, lately, such occasions have been rare (three feature films in 12 years). It's the paradox of an art that becomes all the more sober and succinct as its gestation proves more complicated. With a duration of less than 80 minutes, "Falling Leaves" is symptomatic of the Finnish director's light touch, which captures soulful abysses and social dynamics in just a few carefully composed frames. Beyond the immediate context, where the film acquires an almost desperate aura of righteousness against everything that is going wrong, "Falling Leaves" represents nothing more than a long series of self-quotations from previous films, from the Proletariat Trilogy that began with "Shadows in Paradise" (1986), which the film explicitly continues, to the mummified protagonist from "The Man Without a Past" (2002). The story touches, but touches exactly the same as its predecessors. It's as if the director is lazily compiling a collection from himself.
Coming from Kaurismäki, an artist with a recognizable patina that has become a registered trademark, this balancing act of the film on the edge of stylistic exercise is not surprising. What is surprising, however, is his attempt to acquire an air of topicality at all costs....a move at odds with his natural concerns, which are assumed to be timeless. So...that's why the constant presence of news about the war in Ukraine is free to become, in turn, a joke, which might be seen or interpreted as the latest affront of a capitalist world that multiplies forms of violence against the individual, whether soft or hard.
The most beautiful moment of the film occurs in one such sequence, when the protagonist Ansa (Alma Pöysti) unplugs the radio. Kaurismäki allows indecision to linger for a moment: irritation at the relentless catastrophic news?
Desire for escapism in a world that finally falls silent?
Neither, neither.
With Kaurismäki, things are both more tragic and less sentimental than that: Ansa stops the appliance after reading the energy bill. I think it's the most basic gesture to temper the costs of life. The beauty of the plot speaks of these lives reduced to the essential: no frills, just feelings and vulnerabilities. This is the true politics of the film: one that turns the small gesture, captured with Bresson's intense attention, into the most notable act of resistance against infamy.
If the movie is moving, then its emotion nestles in such details, furtive glances, twists of fate, all capable of generating small detonations in the minimalist dramaturgy of this love story. The sequence in which, on his first date with Ansa, Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) takes advantage of her departure from the table to pour some alcohol into his coffee, but she still catches his gesture in a mirror, is illustrative of the filmmaker's underground power to astonish us through the unsaid: suddenly, this careful man with appearances is compromised in the depths of his being, exposed before the other as an alcoholic, ashamed especially of the shame of this woman.
Like any self-respecting melodrama, "Falling Leaves" has a deeply social substrate: employers abuse their employees, and solidarity among losers is increasingly fragmented due to the omnipresent fear of precariousness. On the other hand, Kaurismäki complicates things by turning the misfortune of timing into a rather personal matter, the result of a mischievous hazard: a gust of wind carries away the note with the phone number, a troublesome train interrupts the protagonist's journey to his girlfriend. The social explains things, but not entirely, because the world is too complex.
More musical than ever, I think this movie is full of hits and chansons, and the karaoke scene continues to be the center of the universe. I got to say it: "Falling Leaves" advances merrily, on comic chords, towards a kind of impasse of society, where salvation becomes possible only outside the realm of work. It's the movie's way of bypassing the grand hustle of capital, inventing a modest alternative where adopting a dog constitutes a much more meaningful act than the alienating routine of pumping money into the pockets of a few big shots.
N-Y-way.... the film is not entirely devoid of a repetitive, almost redundant tone. Suddenly, this patina of uncertain time (you can see digressions or uncertain time narratives with interiors rich in artifacts of the past) may play against the central "argument." The Bressonian aspect of the film (I am using the term with a slightly pejorative sense) becomes so conscious or obvious and I wonder if Kaurismäki seem to have been adopted it. (see also the reference to "Diary of a Country Priest" (1951) because I think it increasingly resembles a recipe that doesn't protect against self-sufficiency). And the inertia of the protagonists is, in fact, the inertia of the film, of its still images. One that seems to extend to reality itself, reduced to the same frozen area upon which directorial control can be exercised without restraint.
I sometimes like this kind of movies and sometimes just hate them and find them time-eaters. Last evening it was ok, but today I wouldn't spend another 5 minutes to engage with such scenario. Maybe because it's Monday and I need to be more practical and make things work.
Thank you for reading!
With respect,
Zpek