Fallen Leaves undercuts standard romantic comedy tropes in favour of honesty

Open this photo in gallery:

About six minutes into Fallen Leaves, the masterfully droll new film from the master of drollery, Aki Kaurismaki, you feel how thoroughly this Finnish writer/director understands romantic comedy, and how much fun he’s having undercutting its tropes. (It began streaming on Mubi Jan. 19.)

Take his introduction of our destined lovers, Ansa (Alma Poysti) and Holappa (Jussi Vatanen). Ansa (in Finnish her name can mean both “virtue” and “trap”) is neither a baker of cupcakes nor a manic pixie dream girl nor a high-powered-but-non-specific urban businesswoman who really should slow down. Instead, she works a dull job in an anonymous big-box store in a drab slab of Helsinki, and is soon fired for taking home expired food instead of tossing it in a dumpster. “I imagine she has the longest CV of lousy jobs,” Poysti said, in flawless English, in a recent video interview.

Holappa, meanwhile, is a construction worker, but not the sensitive, also-a-novelist-who’s-great-with-his-little-niece type. We see him drinking on the job and smoking under a No Smoking sign, next to a tottering stack of flammable gas tanks. At their meet-cute, in a paint-chipped karaoke bar to which friends have dragged them, Ansa and Holappa do catch one another’s gaze and hold it. But forget any kind of banter – they don’t speak. In fact, the script reads, “It disturbs Holappa so much he has to walk away.”

They manage to reconnect, and she invites him for dinner, but again, rather than stumbling in with masses of flowers or adorably cooking blue soup, Ansa’s date prep is the sparest kind – she buys a second plate because she owns only one. When it’s time for the obstacle-to-love trope, Kaurismaki delivers a gut punch: Ansa won’t date an alcoholic. Holappa won’t give up booze. She throws the new plate in the trash.

“At that point in the story she’s deeply in love with him, and to give that up is so painful,” Poysti says. “But she won’t be codependent. She knows it’s common that if you try save someone, you end up with their problem. The way she handles it is not the usual woman trap.”

If by now you are thinking, “This film sounds like a downer,” I promise you it’s the opposite. Kaurismaki and his actors deploy a light touch, a recognizably human affect. Though the tone is deadpan, it’s utterly sincere, never ironic. These two souls are wounded, but there’s so much life in their faces that it’s moved audiences all over the world: It set a box office record in Finland, won the Jury Prize in Cannes last May, scored two Golden Globe nominations, and made the Oscar long list for best international feature.

“There is such a deep humanism in all of Aki’s work,” Poysti says. “He is really rooting for the little guy. It’s not the successful, rich people’s story that is interesting to him – it’s the ordinary people. Ansa and Holappa are not teenagers. They’re both quite shy, they have led rough lives, and their current one is solitary and very lonely. So what will you do, when you find someone who sees you and you see them, right through each other? In fact, it’s not easy at all.”

Unlike films that present their characters’ quirks in tidy packages, Kaurismaki gives Ansa precisely one line of backstory: “My father died of alcohol, and so did my brother, and my mother died of grief.” And that’s exactly enough, Poysti says: “I have my fantasies that love for her is something scary that can destroy you. But I love that the audience can have their own fantasies. This is something beautiful that Aki does; he’s not explaining too much. He leaves room for the audience to project whatever you need for the story to work, whatever relates to your life.”

Fallen Leaves clocks in at a brisk 81 minutes – the shortest script Poysti ever read. “It’s absolutely crystal clear. There was nothing I needed to add that would have made it better. It’s a minimalist world; Aki shoots in a tight frame. But there is always room for life.” He prefers no rehearsal, and one, perhaps two takes. His sole direction? Don’t act.

“It was such a learning journey, realizing how little you can do to tell a story,” Poysti says. “When your expression doesn’t go too wide, it goes deep. If a thought is clear, you can feel it in your beating heart, the blood in your veins. And when you have only one take, that moment becomes very precious and very honest. When you repeat something too much, it wears down a little bit. There might come this little layer of pretending, even if you are a skilled actor. Now I’m obsessed with catching that first moment.”

She’s travelled with the film to Japan, Mexico, the U.S. and Europe, and everywhere audiences have thanked her “for giving them hope in a time that feels rough and scary. I don’t know if I could think of anything more beautiful to be part of than that,” Poysti says. “It’s a more complex story than it seems, more than a romance between two people. It’s about compassion and love in many forms. It’s a film about how to care for each other, in an honest way. I think that’s what’s really touching people – the honesty of it.”

One final subverted trope: Poysti possesses a smile that would rival any romcom sweetheart’s, any Roberts or Diaz or Lopez. But in Fallen Leaves, every smile was scripted. Precisely once did Kaurismaki type, “Ansa smiles and it lights up the whole room.” And even then, Poysti asked him, “How big is the room?”

“He replied, ‘Four by four metres,’” she says, with a grin I would classify as Mischievous Mona Lisa. “So I knew the exact kind of smile we were talking about.”

Special to The Globe and Mail

Sign up for The Globe’s arts and lifestyle newsletters for more news, columns and advice in your inbox.