Review: 'Fallen Leaves' is a sparse and biting Finnish romance that earns its emotions

As bracing as a walk outside on a cold Helsinki night — and about as short — Finnish writer-director Aki Kaurismäki’s “Fallen Leaves” is a romantic comedy stripped away of unnecessary moments, pretense and false sentimentality. It earns its flowers, and deserves them.

Like any romance, this is the story of two people. Ansa (Alma Pöysti) works in a supermarket, where the security guard (Sakari Kuosmanen) stares her down when she’s taking expired groceries to the rubbish bin, because she gives an item to a beggar before throwing it away. Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) works as a welder on a job site, whose employer provides a bunk in a railway car with three other men.

One night, Ansa and her coworker, Liisa (Nuppu Koivu), go to a bar for karaoke night. One of the singers that night is Huotari (Janne Hyytiäinen), Holappa’s philosophical roommate, and Holappa is along for moral support. Huotari chats up Liisa after his song, but Holappa is too frozen to talk to Ansa, and vice versa.

Eventually, there is a date — the movie Holappa chooses is Jim Jarmusch’s “The Dead Don’t Die” (an inside joke between friends; Jarmusch made a cameo in Kaurismäki’s 1989 movie “Leningrad Cowboys Go America,” and Jarmusch used Kaurismäki’s actors in the Helsinki segment of his 1991 movie “Night on Earth”). She gives her his number, but he quickly drops the paper and it blows away.

That’s the first of many obstacles to Ansa and Holappa’s potential happiness, including job losses, financial struggles and Holappa’s frequent drinking — a dealbreaker for Ansa, who says she watched her father and brother die as a result of alcoholism, and won’t put herself through that again.

Kaurismäki is spare with dialogue, and allows his actors only the faintest of expressions. But within that restraint is a wealth of suppressed heartache, longing and a search to make the lonely nights more bearable. Pöysti and Vatanen fit perfectly in this world, taciturn figures who would explode if forced to express the emotions roiling within them. 

One gets the impression that Kaurismäki would have been at home in the silent movie era (there’s a hint of that idea at the very end). “Fallen Leaves” has the deadpan grace of a Buster Keaton film, and ultimately the battered hopefulness of Charlie Chaplin’s best work. 

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‘Fallen Leaves’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, December 15, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for language. Running time: 82 minutes; in Finnish, with subtitles.