Every new morning is indistinguishable for her from the previous thousand. She wakes up alone in her Finnish apartment, looks out the window for a few minutes and thinks sleepily about an empty aquarium that will one day be filled with warmth so that it will never exude cold again. Coffee splashes in the cup, a handful of sugar melts at the bottom, and sometimes milk peeks in, bringing some light into the darkness.
She spends most of her day at work sorting food on supermarket shelves. The eye glides over canned meat and bread packages, fresh goods are hoisted into the gaps, and the expired ones are sent to a cart, which will be shaken into a huge trash can at the end of the day. But they are still edible, despite their dented appearance and dull look.
She usually prefers to remain silent and smiles, either out of politeness or in an attempt to protect herself from unnecessary questions, and deep in her eyes, the outlines of the desert appear. Work replaces her life, and life is like a job where there is no celebration or life. The circle has long been closed, and the serpent, representing the aching meaninglessness of life, has gnawed its tail to its snow-white bones.
He also starts the day even more prosaic, in a four-bed work trailer. The crumpled face is torn off the pillow to wash it with cold water, the fingers run through the perfectly styled hair, and the razor obediently cuts through the base of each bristle, which dares to stand in the way. As a result, the dandy goes to work. This could be anything — a carpentry workshop, a local port, or a construction site.
The kaleidoscope of professions is due to the fact that he rarely stays in one place, because he has prolonged depression. And with depression comes alcohol, but, as you'd expect, an extra degree only fills this very depression with strength. The serpent of meaninglessness keeps biting its tail, revolving around an irrepressible life that doesn't care about individual destinies.
Alcohol is tucked away in every secluded place it can reach. Under the pants in a personal locker, in the switchboard, in the inner pocket of the jacket and, most likely, in a false tooth that in another era may have been filled with potassium cyanide. As soon as others lose sight of him, he dips his gut into forty-degree nectar, which momentarily dulls his loneliness.
For the umpteenth time, the main characters of Aki Kaurismäki's film are not so much marginalized people as outcast souls — the same ones “Fallen Leaves”. Neither he nor she found a suitable place in a leisurely society where they spend their holidays in a cabin on the edge of the forest, have dinner with their family in the evenings and never swear over small things. For them, this quiet backwater has remained inaccessible for years.
They meet at the lowest point. She is left without work with a handful of coins in her pocket, but he is about to be caught drinking again and sent to spend the night on a park bench. In addition, an armed conflict looms in the background, which is announced by the radio whenever possible. It would seem what love can be like in such circumstances — an already not very pleasant world is being blurred by autumn rain.
But their attraction is not due to their fabulous love, which fills some with awe and forces others to languish in anticipation. Unlike the main characters of “Past Lives”, who met thanks to long-lost sympathy, they carry the longing that has accumulated over the years. And Aki Kaurismäki plainly states that this shared feeling is much stronger than ordinary love, which is blown away by the first gust of wind.
So it doesn't matter what time they met. He might as well have been a successful dentist or history teacher at school. She is an unrecognized choreographer or hospice nurse. Even financial well-being and having a family would not correct the sadness that binds them more strongly than common interests and fleeting chemical reactions. Some would call this attraction fate, but Aki Kaurismäki sees it as almost comically inevitable.
“Fallen Leaves” and its characters flutter as if in timelessness. Aki Kaurismäki's works have always been somewhat detached, as if he wasn't interested in everyday life at all. But this time he went further and seems to be very close to Roy Anderson's films. He and she talk in snatches and show little emotion, and the environment reminds us of a bygone era that no one knew existed.
Time is relative in this world, as well as in the real world. For Aki Kaurismäki, this is not a constant value, but an undefined substance that varies from person to person and from block to block, even within the boundaries of the same city. And he says this not in order to be grumpy, but because there is no point in dismissing the truth. Anyway, one day she'll come out like the threads from a worn sweater.
The cleaner will sweep the autumn leaves down a neat hill. And he and she will be buried in these depths, right next door. But when they spot each other, a playful dog will rush by and throw it aside, and the wind will catch him. Life would do anything to keep them apart. And yet, even at the suggestion of an aging Finn, they will be hit by the very inevitability that will unite them into one. The beauty is that no one is destined to escape from this inevitability. Otherwise it wasn't her, it was just a mirage in a deserted gaze.
