Finland's best cinematic export and worst representative of its tourism industry returns from self-declared retirement with his 18th feature, and Fallen Leaves has all his trademarks stamped through it like a stick of rock. Underclass protagonists shat on by officious employers and indifferent officialdom, incessant smoking in the place of dialogue, what dialogue there is being absurdly matter-of-fact and never over a short sentence at a time, suicide-inducingly gloomy interiors, bloody-mindedly melancholic music and another setback for the characters always just around the corner.
This time, it's about a supermarket shelf-stacker and a construction worker who both get fired from their jobs and meet by chance, starting a fledgling relationship that is soon derailed.
As always, it's both sporadically very droll in its most deadpan moments and constantly Loach-like in its fury at the system. However, the latter aspect is undermined by Kaurismäki employing more poetic licence than ever with his depiction of the grim world. He was once asked what year his latest film was set in, and his reply was "between 1950 and now". True, there are the usual elements of both the past and present, but when it suits him for the sake of providing a target for his ire, it does not serve the purpose to create such a fiction where there is no social safety net, no employment laws, no libraries for free internet access and ludicrously antiquated and hazardous industries. This means that it is more a fantastical nightmare than a social critique.
All that said, you do get the sense that the taciturn couple will find each other in the end. That is by no means a given with the director, even as he approaches old age.
7/10
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