Aki Kaurismakis new masterpiece causes a stir at the Cannes

Aki Kaurismäki’s new masterpiece causes a stir at the Cannes festival

Fallen Leaves could be a silent film, although that would deprive us of all its songs (tangos, mambos, Finnish pop) and its other soundtrack: the terrible news about the war in Ukraine coming through radio broadcasts. Conflict slipped into the 76th Cannes Film Festival thanks to the most romantic film in the program, directed by the charismatic and laconic Finnish genius Aki Kaurismäki. His new film is the simplest, saddest and most perfect of the entire competition. It is the star rating favorite and the first – and so far only – film in the competition to receive a critical ovation.

Fallen Leaves lasts 81 minutes and tells the story of two lonely beings, an alcoholic and an unlucky woman, whose paths one day cross. On their first date, they go to the cinema together to see Jim Jarmusch’s zombie film The Dead Don’t Die. Kaurismäki flaunts his cinematic credentials in an unpretentious manner: the couple say goodbye at the end of their date in front of a poster of David Lean’s classic, Brief Encounter.

But the true lighthouse of this film is Charles Chaplin, who “is still the greatest of all time,” Kaurismäki said at the press conference. “He created cinema as it is today and he kept it simple.” The final scene has an amusing nod to Chaplin’s incomparable 1931 classic City Lights guided by emotions, but also by the architecture of the spaces that make up everything in a film about a worker, Holappa, played by Jussi Vatanen – a kind of Nordic James Stewart – and a supermarket worker, Ansa, played by Alma Pöysti.

One of the film’s central themes is alcohol, but when asked about it at Cannes, the filmmaker responded with his usual sarcasm: “I chose it because it’s so unfamiliar to me.” Kaurismäki, who has lived in Portugal for years, has A beautiful statement of intent was made on his new film: “Although I’ve earned my dubious reputation by making mostly unnecessary violent films, by the end I was crushed by all the senseless and nonsensical criminal wars to write a story about the themes through which humanity could have a future: the longing for love, solidarity, hope and respect for other people, for nature […] In the film I tip my undersized hat to my own film gods Bresson, Ozu and Chaplin, but I am still solely responsible for this catastrophic failure!”

According to his actors, Kaurismäki doesn’t like rehearsals and is “an old-school man,” Pöysti said. This shy filmmaker with a slightly grumpy sense of humor, who looked a bit scruffy at 66, admitted he included his own dog in the cast. The animal, abandoned near his home in Portugal, “deserves the dog palm”.

When Kaurismäki was asked by a Ukrainian journalist if he wasn’t afraid to include hints of a war that in Europe “already seems to bore everyone,” the filmmaker, who rejects Finland’s membership in NATO, replied: “Unfortunately, Europe exists no longer. At least in a philosophical sense. Now, as a Finn, I couldn’t make a film without remembering what’s happening. Slava Ukraine! [Glory to Ukraine!]“.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter for more English language news from the EL PAÍS USA Edition