Fallen Leaves by Aki Kaurismäki begins in a supermarket. Meat is piled onto a conveyor belt, scanned, and bought. Shelves are stocked, older food reduced or trashed. Some gorging/disgorging loop recurs here. And Ansa, played by Alma Pöysti, works away within it, judging and condemning out of date cheeses.

Sitting down to watch a film two parts of me co-exist. The child anxious to be occupied, and the man pre-occupied and wanting to switch off. Many films I enjoy are successful because they resolve these parts of me. Enthralling the child, and permitting my executive mind a waking rest.

Ansa heads home. She and her coworker don matching coats, implying that the uniformity of the shop we are exiting from extends into the outside world. Ansa is on a bus and then she arrives at home. It is bare, whilst referencing a mid-century aesthetic, and yet a radio plays with news of the Ukraine War from 2022. I knew then that the world of this film is intended to be a stage, not some attempt at a hyper-real contemporary space that we are so often presented with in TV and Film. Here, in these opposing timestamps, is an intentional reminder that this film and the world in which these characters exist is an invention.

I am a Cinderella, and the cinema – Curzon Hoxton – is the ball, I arrive and wait to see if my Prince Charming will appear and whisk me away. Recently Dune, Anatomy of a Fall and Past Lives did just that, and I didn’t properly return to myself, and my thoughts, until the credits rolled. Though I usually feel relief whilst watching, sometimes, after this “whisking away”, I am left with a slight ick as the film ends. Netflix documentaries are a prime culprit. They wrap you up in a cosy high-ish production value, chuck story at you and before you know it you’ve given your time to a film or mini-series that was without integrity, produced with little to no regard for the people within it, and left you feeling confused about what the point was; if you’ve watched The Tiger King you know what I mean. These icks come in other flavours too: unaware male gaze, a moment of bigotry in a script used only to add drama, a seeming lack of reflection on what tropes this film might be playing into.

In this case Aki Kaurismäki, the glass slipper does fit. But rather than picking me up and whisking me away, he was asking me to put a little effort in myself. And so we meet Holappa, played by Jussi Vatanen. His job is to sandblast what look like rusted train wheels. Dressed in a tattered, and no longer protective, protective suit, he takes gulps from a bottle of alcohol before he works and afterwards he smokes under a sign that says not to. Not long after that Holappa and Ansa meet in a bar, and share a look.

The “ick” isn’t the only way a film can disappoint me. Nodding along with a character’s impassioned speech, or leaning in my chair as the car goes round the corner, usually I am fully engrossed in what I’m watching, but not always. If the film is straight up shit, or just pretty shit, or if I feel betrayed in some way by the filmmaker I’ll come crashing back to my seat. This isn’t always a bad thing though. Other films purposefully do this, reminding the watcher that you are in fact watching an invention. Examples of this are Grizzly Man by Werner Herzog and The Stories We Tell by Sarah Polley where both directors talk explicitly about their own partiality within the invention of the film itself. In fact, most of my favourite films do this, because not only is the “child” part of my mind occupied , but the other part, the adult, the bit that knows these shadows on the wall are not real, is also being addressed and asked to enter into the film too.

So Ansa and Holappa weave through this world, tripping and falling together. But all the while I’m not quite in it with them, the world they’re in is over-designed, not so far off a Wes Anderson; though unlike Wes Anderson the design isn’t the point. Here the design serves to negate itself, to point to it’s designed-ness, so too does the dialogue, the references to other films and the sound; a wilhelm scream shouts “I am artifice”. And amongst that I am now eagerly watching for what is real here! Not the war, nor the trials the characters go through, nor the characters themselves; they have something invented/symbolic about them too. The themes of the film: a system which presses down on humans, creating copies of itself, ad infintum, until the whole world is a factory for similarity and discontent, though deserving a review of their own, become secondary to me*. As if they are leaves falling away from a tree all the artifice and structure we are so familiar with in film becomes secondary, until all I can see are the small things. A wink, a kiss. I read the words of a song, watch and listen to its performance, a music video within the film, a mise en abyme.

I came back to myself in the cinema – Picture House Crouch End the second time round – as the credits rolled I was left with a little more wonder than when the film had started. Small moments, that exist outside of everything else, can be the very heart of things. Next time I share a wink, a kiss or take a moment to think on the bus on the way home, hopefully I’ll remember these are remarkable moments. As I said, I watched this film without any knowledge of Aki Kaurismäki‘s previous work, which would have surely added layers to my understanding and what I took away from it, but if all a film does is remind us to treasure something new in life, I say go see it.

Josh x

*If you’re interested in a good review, including those themes, you can read one from the BFI here.