Fallen Leaves (2023)

This film has been submitted by Finland for the Best International Film category and was shortlisted for that back in December. I do not have a lot of experience with Finnish films, but this seems very much related to the Scandinavian film school, where even humor can be dark. I read a review which posited that this is a perfect film, which is defined as: A perfect film knows what it’s about, knows what it wants to say, and knows that even when what it has to say is unusually simple, what it says can’t be reduced to words or any form of description apart from the thing itself, and that a perfect film has to be seen in order for its perfection to be appreciated. There is a lot going on in this sparse movie, most of it without much in the way of dialogue. The movie is a muted romance that goes through conventional narrative paces. A man, Jussi, and woman, Ansa, both shrouded in loneliness, almost meet, then do meet, then can’t meet, then meet again, then come to an understanding that unites them. The complications are familiar ones. There’s booze, there are bad jobs, there’s an encroaching outside world full of troubles. This are a lot of socially conscious aspects of this, down to Ansa’s evening radio broadcasts delineating the Russian invasion of Mariupol deliberate bombing of civilians, ending with a report of the loss of life at a maternity hospital. I had just watched the documentary of this, and the radio reports accurately reflected those atrocities. Finland shares a 830 miles border, so it is quite relevant to them what their neighbors consider standard operating procedures if they think it is theirs to take.