FALLEN LEAVES - CAMBRIDGE FILM FESTIVAL

This film puts the hell into Helskini. Our two protagonists have indeed sunk as far as you can go in modern Finland; he drunk, jobless and sleeping on a park bench, she desperately lonely, unfairly sacked from a humdrum job now reduced to shoveling gravel for a pittance. Not you might think the ideal setting for a heart-warming social comedy. And yet it brilliantly succeeds in a thoroughly Scandi deadpan way, the driest of humour – and there’s a good dollop of cringeworthy karaoke to keep you smiling.

Aki Kaurismaki has created a very stylish and off-the-wall essay on the power of love to conquer all. The influence of cinema is all-pervasive: the couple have a fateful meeting at a local cinema and part in front of a film poster of ‘Brief Encounter’. There is much lush music of a romantic kind set against the reality of grim poverty. Tchaikovsky even sounds heroic amid the garbage bins. The on-off romance is set against radio news broadcasts of civilian casualties in Ukraine. ‘Bloody war’, snaps the anguished woman played with dignified grace by Alma Poysti. Meanwhile Jussi Vatanen is perfectly gaunt, hungry for warmth and love as the labourer who can’t stay away from the bottle.

As said earlier, cinematic references abound – there’s fun to be had with Jim Jarmusch’s zombie film (how about that movie for a first date?) and a final sequence that takes its bowler off to Chaplin.

Fallen Leaves shows that even in a bleak mid autumn, even in a sinking hell, there is hope. Our Film Festival presenter said this was her personal ‘top two films of the year’. Catch it on general release soon.