Ansa is a lonely woman who works as a stocker in a Helsinki supermarket and one day she gets fired for putting an expired sandwich in her bag. Holappa is a construction worker who is overly fond of drinking and equally lonely and down on his luck. One night the two of them exchange their languid glances at a karaoke bar - he comes accompanied by a friend and says that he doesn't sing because he is "a tough guy" -. But it won't be until later, when they meet again on the street just as she loses her job again, that they meet to have a drink and go to the movies.
Theirs will be an unexpected love story, built in a few words and great hopes that veteran Aki Kaurismäki traces in Fallen leaves, a simple and powerful masterpiece about characters who seem not destined to be together but do not resign themselves, in the midst of a gray existence of precariousness and injustice. Holappa is played by Jussi Vatanen and Ansa is played by Alma Pöysti, who received her Golden Globe nomination for best actress with great joy: "It is quite an honor. The reception of the film is overwhelming all over the world" , she says smilingly in a videoconference conversation with La Vanguardia.
Both had long dreamed of working with the Finnish director. "I received a call from his producer to meet in person at Aki's restaurant in Helsinki and while I was on the way I couldn't stop thinking about what was going to happen because he is a legend in Finland and it was like meeting Elvis. Also, "I knew he was thinking about retiring from cinema and I didn't want to miss the opportunity," says this 45-year-old actor who bears a great resemblance to James Stewart.
Alma is also a big fan of the director of Le Havre and was nervous to meet him. "Aki had a very precise vision of what he wanted to tell. The script was wonderful, almost like poetry and you realize that it is all there. There are not many words, but all the situations, the characters, all the clues about them were in the text. You just had to read it carefully and get into the role and then everything would turn out well. The actress, who became known in Spain for the biopic of Tove Jansson, creator of the Moomins, describes the director as a "very warm and generous person."
"Aki has been filming for 40 years and knows exactly what he wants," he adds. single take. So the whole movie, almost all of it, was done in one take. This way you get those really precious moments where something happens once and for the first time. So if you manage to do it right, it's something special and precious. And it shows in the final result."
Jussi defines his character as "a lonely man who doesn't have many things in his life. His work and his comics and, of course, he has a very close relationship with alcohol. He is proud, well I think he is more stubborn than proud. But What I like most about the movie and my character is that when he meets this beautiful lady at the karaoke bar he feels something he hasn't felt in a long time. I don't know, I guess he has this idea that maybe life isn't there yet. "It has shown him all its beauty. And he has to make a decision. Have the courage to give up alcohol and make a change in his life."
For the actor "examining a person's behavior in a situation like this was very interesting." The same goes for Ansa, "a hard-working and independent woman with a difficult and sad past. In reality, she has no family, but I could say that she has a chosen family through her friends. And I suppose she also feels proud of not needing the support of society or a husband or someone who supports her. She is very alone, until that man appears who is going to turn her life around," says Pöysti.
One of the most surprising things is that the film is set in 2024 but it seems to take place in the fifties or sixties of the last century. Everything looks old. From people's clothes or entertainment venues to the protagonist's house, who listens to the incessant news about the Russian invasion of Ukraine on an old radio. "Damn war," she says, already tired. In fact, Kaurismaki confessed at the last Cannes festival, where she won the Jury Prize: "The war made me feel that this damned world needed some love stories."
And this is an atypical romantic story that uses a lot of humor in its portrait of a crushed and aging working class that drinks and enjoys, yes, cinema and music. Because Fallen Leaves also seems like a great tribute to the seventh art with nods to Chaplin or Roco and his brothers, to the sound of a tango by Gardel. "People can be happy even though their faces look sad. Or you can look happy and feel very sad. Aki creates this kind of fairy tale by throwing logic out the window. The inside of the train may look old, but the outside is totally modern," concludes Alma, who next year will make the leap to Hollywood with The Summer Book alongside Glenn Close.
