Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Fallen Leaves
2023 · Aki Kaurismäki · Fallen Leaves on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice how often characters face the camera straight on. (staging)
Kaurismäki stages interiors like color-blocked stage sets, figures held in careful, frontal, almost pictorial stillness rather than caught in motion.
Payoff: Every room looks composed before anyone speaks, like a painting waiting for you to notice the people in it.
Notice blocks of red, green, and blue against otherwise muted rooms. (light)
Salminen's palette isolates saturated primary colors, a coat, a jukebox, a door, against dark or muted surrounds rather than a naturalistic wash.
Payoff: The color doesn't decorate the mood. It carries it directly, the way a held note carries a feeling.
Listen for the radio reporting the war in the background. (sound)
News bulletins about Russia's invasion of Ukraine play in the kitchen and elsewhere, heard but never shown, with no footage and no map to place it.
Payoff: The war never becomes a place you can point to. It only ever arrives as sound with nowhere to go. In the reading: out-of-field-absolute. Deleuze calls this an absolute out-of-field: a beyond no camera move can reach, unlike the next room or the street outside.
Watch how little expression crosses Ansa's face. (performance)
Alma Pöysti underplays almost to stillness, so a glance or a half-smile carries the weight a bigger performance would spend on a whole scene.
Payoff: Nothing crosses that face, and somehow everything is still on it.
Notice how many small mishaps keep the two apart. (structure)
A lost phone number, a wrong address, missed timing: the film stacks small, ordinary obstacles rather than one dramatic one.
Payoff: None of these problems is something a person can fight. They just have to be outlasted.
Once you have seen it
Watch what Holappa does instead of chasing after Ansa. (performance)
When an obstacle costs him her number, his answer isn't pursuit, it's a drink, a pattern that recurs and costs him more each time.
Payoff: His drinking traces a steady downward pull the film takes seriously without ever using it for melodrama. In the reading: entropy / degradation. Deleuze calls this a line of slope: a downward pull toward exhaustion running underneath the ordinary comedy of obstacles.
Notice what Ansa names the stray dog she takes in. (setting)
She calls him Chaplin, tying the film's ending directly to the tramp films the whole story quietly echoes throughout.
Payoff: The name is the film telling you exactly which tradition of hopeful endings it's borrowing from.
Notice there's no crowd, no union, no collective in this story. (structure)
The film calls itself a working-class film with almost no visible working class: a fired shelf-stocker, a sandblaster, a dog, and nobody else standing with them.
Payoff: Two people and a dog are made to carry what a whole class used to represent. In the reading: people-are-missing. Deleuze's phrase for this is that the people are missing: when there's no ready-made collective, a film has to invent one at a time.
Carry this in: Watch how still their faces stay. The feeling is all in what doesn't move.