Aki Kaurismäki makes great films. Similar to his brother from another mother, Jarmusch, his films mix a borderline Brechtian distancing with emotionally genuine stories of people just trying to find their way. If you buy in to what he’s throwing out (and not everyone can buy in), you are rewarded with a beautiful, funny, emotional film — an emotional film that is neither melodramatic nor cloying. There is a certain tendency in international film for an vocal subset of Americans in particular to gush over films that tend to be cloying and narratively unsophisticated, but they go crazy for them. Most recently there have been some Korean films that fit this bill — counterbalanced by truly great films like Parasite. Not Fallen Leaves. There is a quirky aesthetic that encourages a certain distancing, but characters (and the actors behind them) that create such an emotional authenticity that you can’t help to get sucked into their world. It has you laughing with their resigned frustration. To emphasize this tension between these poles, Kaurismäki uses radio broadcasts of the war in Ukraine as a background to a world that in many ways has no technology beyond the late 60’s. The tension between the massive global threat that is the war in Ukraine finds its way into scenes about two people awkwardly wrestling with very personal and ‘small’ predicaments. Like an old scratched LP skipping — stuck on a world that looks half a century old, the Ukraine war broadcasts bring us back to the present. Its an unsettling tension that makes the film that much more fantastic.
Sloves' Rants
