Fallen Leaves (2023, Aki Kaurismäki) (Patreon)

59/100

Really wanted to adjust the balance here, get the sound properly channeled from both speakers. Onscreen romance needs impediments, but it's not very satisfying when one party's fucked up and the other's entirely blameless; here, Ansa remains sympathetic even in her ostensible transgressions (e.g. she's fired for stealing food from the supermarket where she works, but they're expired items that were gonna be thrown away), and the only thing preventing her from finding happiness with Holappa is the fact that he's an alcoholic. That's the entire conflict: She won't get romantically involved with a drunk, sensibly enough, so we wait for him to finally sober up. He does; the end. Kaurismäki stretches this out with the ol' don't-know-your-name-and-now-I've-lost-your-number bit, which affords him opportunities to have Ansa and Holappa stand in front of old movie posters (as a cute in-joke, their first date was seeing The Dead Don't Die; both then repeatedly return to that theater looking for each other), kicking off what becomes a pronounced yet somehow still very tangential love letter to cinema: more posters in other locations, a closing Chaplin reference, etc. And the film still winds up feeling decidedly slight, even for him. Not as strikingly colorful as his last few efforts, either, it seemed to me, though Salminen's work might well be chromatically impressive in ways that don't leap out at a viewer who responds primarily to heavily saturated primaries. All of that's Ed, this is still a fairly potent charm offensive (leavened by grim radio-news reports from Ukraine that seemed gratuitous until I remembered that Finland borders Russia), particularly whenever Alma Pöysti is front and center doing her best Kati Outinen. And I really grew to love Holappa's tragically vain karaoke buddy, for whom there's no occasion too solemn for assurances that he's nowhere near as old as people probably think that he looks.