Synopsis
Fallen Leaves (Kuolleet lehdet, 2023) is Aki Kaurismäki's deadpan romance you can watch online on iFILM. A karaoke bar in nighttime Helsinki, two lonely people past forty, one chance meeting that almost doesn't survive the night.
Ansa loses her supermarket job over an expired sandwich. Holappa drinks too much and patches himself onto construction crews between binges. Something quiet and genuine starts between them, and then everything conspires to pull it apart: a phone number on a scrap of paper that blows away, a wrong address, an accident, a bottle. Kaurismäki tells it sparingly, in his familiar palette of faded walls and old radios that murmur war bulletins from Ukraine. Alma Pöysti and Jussi Vatanen carry it.
The Finnish master made a film barely 81 minutes long and nearly wordless about two people who keep reaching for each other despite rotten luck. It took the Jury Prize at Cannes and was Finland's Oscar submission. Dry humor, a stray dog named Chaplin, and an ending warmer than you expect. Stream Fallen Leaves (2023) online on iFILM.
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