2023-09-20 14:17:00
Jury prize at Cannes, the Finnish filmmaker tells the story of the improbable meeting of two lonely souls in the gray of Helsinki. Funny and moving.
Pair Jean-Luc Wachthausen Alma Pöysti and Jussi Vatanen dans le nouveau film d’Aki Kaurismäki, Dead leaves, jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival. © Diaphana Distribution. Published on 09/20/2023 at 2:17 p.m.
It’s one of the gems of the last Cannes Film Festival, a rare, funny, modest film, concocted by the Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki (Le Havre, The Man Without a Past), which is always pure. This time, it tells a moving love story between two shy people who meet by chance in a city flooded with fog, Helsinki, as if frozen in an era, that of transistors, bistros and jukeboxes. Although there are posters of Contempt and of Rocco and his brothers, we are in 2023 in a world where disorder and loneliness reign.
Holappa is a construction site worker and Ansa works in a supermarket. He teases aquavit a little too much and quickly loses his job. Ditto for her, who made the mistake of giving expired food to a homeless person. Ansa lives in a small apartment and listens every evening on the radio to news of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which shares a long border with Finland. Holappa lines up the glasses while thinking of his buried youth. Nothing fancy, and yet their story touches the heart.
They are two lonely, mute souls who meet by chance one evening at a karaoke show. He takes the opportunity to cover Finnish rock of absolute darkness, which contrasts with melancholic songs from another age and mambo Italiano.
Choosing between her and the bottle
They both look at each other without speaking. For their first date, they go to the cinema The Dead Don’t Die, by Jim Jarmush, whom one spectator compares to… Robert Bresson. We laugh despite this melancholy which grips the characters. She scribbles her cell phone number on a piece of paper, which it immediately loses, carried away by a gust of wind. Will they meet again? Suspense. They end up meeting at a dinner at Ansa’s, who asks her to choose between her and the bottle. Jussi Vatanen/Holappa shows off his tall figure and his longing for life, while Alma Pöysti/Ansa says everything on his face: resignation, tenderness and hope for a better life together.
READ ALSO “Last Summer”: the shot-shot bourgeois drama by Catherine BreillatAs always with Kaurismäki, modesty and minimalism are essential, in the dialogues as well as the settings. A few words, just a few looks, and the charm works immediately as if by a miracle, like a little flame that illuminates two characters battered by life. Love is there, waiting for them, the 66-year-old filmmaker tells us. In this daily grayness, he distills a few flashes of humor and fantasy which accentuate his simple, humanist message, full of tenderness.
His cinema is light as air, fluid, pure, surprising. Like these Dead leaves, moving romance whose ending is a nod to Charlie Chaplin from Modern times : a woman and a man move away on a road towards a future that we imagine is full of promise.
Dead leavesd’Aki Kaurismäki, with Alma Pöysti, Jussi Vatanen, Janne Hyytiäinen… Durée : 1 h 21, en salle mercredi 20 septembre.
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