Fixed shots, characters evolving in old-fashioned settings, rare but precise dialogues, marked allusions to silent cinema, a poetry of poverty, an extraordinary sense of the absurd… No doubt, here we are in a film by Aki Kaurismäki.
Six years later The other side of hope (2017), the Finnish master is back with a melancholic comedy which gives pride of place to the frail, the lost, the left behind, and which offers a break of gentleness to the free spirits prisoners of a system which seeks to grind them.
The dead leaves – a tribute to the eponymous song by Jacques Prévert and Joseph Kosma – are Ansa (Alma Pöysti) and Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), two solitary souls whose paths cross by chance. The first, fired from the supermarket where she worked for giving an expired sandwich to a homeless person, works multiple poorly paid jobs to keep her head above water. The second, a construction worker, was fired for having consumed alcohol on the construction site.
Attracted to each other from the first sight, the two cripples will see their idyll thwarted by a series of misunderstandings and unfortunate coincidences which will force their paths to cross rather than merge, all against a backdrop of distressing news from the war in Ukraine.
Aki Kaurismäki once again demonstrates his undeniable talent for the absurd, punctuating the tragic and bleak aspect of his story with tasty lines that Prévert himself would not deny. “I’m depressed because I drink. But why do you drink then? Because I’m depressed,” says Holappa, for example, in a circular declamation that recalls the vicious loop in which he is entangled.
The retro atmosphere that emanates from the sets, coupled with anachronistic allusions to the era – zombie films and karaoke rub shoulders with references to the New Wave and timeless hits, ranging from Schubert to contemporary rock through Mambo Italiano —, helps to establish an offbeat atmosphere which reinforces the burlesque side of the story. In this elsewhere that evokes yesterday, Kaurismäki takes the opportunity to call on the greatest, winking at Chaplin, Tati and even Bresson.
The filmmaker’s refined staging also perfectly matches the tribulations of his characters, who search for each other without ever meeting, each isolated in a frame where the absence of the other is highlighted.
Here, the effusions associated with great romances give way to a rare word steeped in languor carried by the embodied play of the two actors, who, in a game voluntarily imperturbable in the face of the absurdity and misery of everyday life, manage to convey a fragility and a emotional register as subtle as it is powerful.
Faced with a world that is collapsing, where the days follow one another in the same relentless misery, the same blindness, the same nonsense, Aki Kaurismäki takes up the challenge of tenderness with flying colors.