Review of Fallen Leaves / Kuolleet lehdet, directed by Aki Kaurismäki

Back in September 2023, I had the wonderful opportunity to cover the 2023 New York Film Festival for the second year as a row. I worked as a critic for MovieWeb, and found film festivals to be one of the most exciting parts of the job, if we’re going to be honest.

In 2023 I ended up seeing quite a few movies at the film festival and covering them officially for MovieWeb. Fallen Leaves was one of them, and it was what I think the US Premiere of the movie. I remember the press room for the film was so crowded, but it was the reactions that really stood out to me after.

I decided to revisit this movie recently to see how it would hold up in my memory, which is why I’m sitting down to review this film today. I had a MUBI subscription up until recently, and this was available on the US subscribers.

Let’s get into the review!

Ansa and Holappa meet, and while sparks don’t fly, they sure fall in love somewhere along the way.

We first meet our female protagonist in this movie: Ansa. She lives and works in Helsinki, and spends a chunk of her time at her supermarket job. There, while on a zero hour contract, she takes some of the expired food and finds herself let go. She’s pretty lonely, and agrees to go out with a friend to a karaoke bar.

We then meet Holappa, who’s an alcoholic and depressed sandblaster who takes large chugs of his booze on the job when he thinks no one is looking. He goes out with his friend to the same bar, and finds himself meeting Ansa. His friend goes up and sings for the audience, and Ansa’s friend compliments him.

Holappa and Ansa meet then, but say nothing to each other. She finds him drunk on a bench while heading home, and after checking on him, she leaves him behind. Ansa starts looking for another job after getting kicked out of the supermarket, and ends up at a bar. But her boss is arrested on day two, and she’s short of luck.

Then she runs into Holappa, who buys her a sweet and coffee. They go to the movies together later, and despite it being completely and utterly awkward, they think it went well. She writes down her phone number at the end of the date, but he drops it and is unable to contact her.

Ansa then gets upset when he never calls her, and Holappa desperately tries to find her. He waits outside the movie theater for hours, and is then fired from his job after getting caught drinking. He loses his housing because of it, but he finally spots Ansa outside the theater one night. She brings him home for dinner, but turns out she has booze trauma.

Alcoholism ruined her family, so she throws him out. He finds another job, but is fired for drinking again. Ansa adopts a homeless dog in the meantime, while Holappa decides to quite drinking for her.

He tells Ansa he wants to apologize, but while heading to her house, he is hit by a train. She doesn’t realize what happened until one day she runs into his friend while walking the dog, who explains how Holappa is in the hospital.

She still doesn’t know Holappa’s name, but she finds him anyways. He’s in a coma, so she reads and talks to him. When he wakes up, he leaves with her, and asks for the dog’s name instead of hers. She says she named him Chaplin, and the movie ends with that.

Overall Thoughts

This is a movie that lives and breathes within European ways of thinking and making movies—if you’re not used to the way Finnish people do humor, you’re in for a rough time with this one. One of the reactions I was eavesdropping on after the movie from some critics is how they thought it would be better.

Watching this with a bunch of film and industry people was certainly a hoot, though. They got all of the references, and people started dying when the Adam Driver zombie movie started playing on the screen. I had a chuckle here and there, too.

This is a short movie overall though, so if you think there’s room in your schedule and you have the right subscriptions or resources to watch it, go ahead. You probably will not regret it if this plot sounds interesting to you. I didn’t love this film, but I think it was a decent movie!

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