Aki Kaurismäki’s romance film Fallen Leavessneaks up on you. Following its lead characters, Ansa and Holappa, around Helsinki, Kaurismäki is gentle in his approach to build a space for these two. In Fallen Leaves, Ansa and Holappa are both from the working class, taking up daily wage jobs, often with little security.
It’s Kaurismäki’s fourth time turning his lens onto this subject, of infusing proletarian lives with romance and comedy, of not defining these characters by their work, but rather by how they live. For Alma Pöysti, who portrays Ansa in the film, working with Kaurismäki meant giving in to your vulnerabilities. “You have to just take away all the layers, all the masks and be as bare and pure and honest as possible and dare to let the camera in on that,” she tells The Hindu over a Zoom call interview. This process is not as difficult as it sounds when working with Kaurismäki; according to her, it’s very easy to trust Aki and his team “because they have been doing it for such a long time!”
Fallen Leaves follows Kaurismäki’s earlier films Shadows in Paradise (1986), Ariel (1988), and The Match Factory Girl (1990), all of which Alma watched while preparing for her role as Ansa. Fallen Leaves is also unique in its cinematic language, which tends to lean heavily on a time gone by. Jussi Vatanen, who plays Holappa, reveals that this is a result of Kaurismäki using old 35mm film cameras. “It was in a trip to old-fashioned filmmaking,” he says.
Alma Pöysti and Jussi Vatanen in a still from ‘Fallen Leaves’ | Photo Credit: @mubi/YouTube
“Aki told us before he started that would like to do everything in one take only, and that was pretty much the case. We didn’t always succeed in it, but that was the goal,” Jussi says, describing the experience of working with Kaurismäki for the first time. “It was terrifying at first to work with this master, but when we got the hang of it, it was totally exciting also – like falling in love.”
“I love the aesthetics of having these long takes with just faces, and as an audience, you can just project your own thoughts and feelings to that,” Alma says. In fact, Fallen Leaves contains very little in the way of dialogue, letting its visuals do most of the talking. “It’s been curious to see how little you can do to tell a story expression-wise. It may not go wide, but maybe it goes deep,” Alma adds.
The film is also held up by its supporting cast, which helps Ansa and Holappa in their times of need. For Alma, one of her favourite scenes in the film turned out to be the one she shared with Nuppu Koivu who played Liisa. When Ansa is fired from her supermarket job, her colleagues including Liisa stand up for her. “It was our first shooting day and when our other co-actor asked how do we do this, Nuppu who has worked with Aki before, said, ‘Don’t act and don’t look into the camera’, and then we basically just try to help each other there and find these tones to calibrate ourselves into Aki’s style.” She describes it as metaphorical in some ways; the on-screen Ansa got support from her co-workers, as did Alma.
It’s a scene of a compassion, she says, because in a system where people are not treated in a good way, when they stick to each other and care for each other, they have some power.
Alma’s understanding summarises the idea of Fallen Leaves which relies on these human connections to smoothen out the edges of life. The film leaves us with a positive, but slightly open ending where even though we know that Ansa and Holappa are together, we don’t know if that’s how they will end up. But Alma and Jussi are confident. “I think they will stick together but there will be some ups and downs definitely,” says Jussi, while Alma adds, “They have been together through so much already, they have really fought quite hard to be together so they won’t throw it away easily.”
Fallen Leaves will be available to stream on Mubi from January 19
