(Credit: Press / Bufo)

Fallen Leaves, Finland’s Oscar submission for this year and winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes, is a deliberately peculiar romantic comedy that finds the funny side of the dispassionate, blasé tone and bleak outlook often associated with Scandinavian films. Prolific veteran director and screenwriter Aki Kaurismäki is known for producing parodies of various genres, from Noir to pop musicals, adding his own peculiar flavour to each.

In Fallen Leaves, he achieves the movie’s unique mood with an atmosphere of almost continuously dreary and depressing sights and sounds serving as the backdrop for a restrained and awkward but surprisingly charming love story. The director considers Fallen Leaves a fourth part of his ‘Proletariat Trilogy’ of the late 1980s, all of which follow a similar undemonstrative, minimal style against an equally dreary background – an approach one film festival official described as “Wim Wenders on steroids”. In this case, it is a style that works perfectly for the purposes of dry comedy.

Set in Helsinki and featuring the shabbier and less picturesque parts of the city, the film follows the young working-class couple Ansa (Alma Pöysti) and Holappa (Jussi Vatanen). Their workplaces are exaggeratedly dismal and shown as full of unspoken oddities in the background, from a woman purchasing a bizarrely huge quantity of raw meat to workers routinely eking out their income by stealing expired food from the trash.

The two first meet when they accompany friends to a karaoke bar with a distinct lack of festive atmosphere. Their interactions are always strikingly deadpan, even as they go through the superficial acts of courtship. Their efforts at a romance are not only comically dispassionate but awkward and inept, the relationship frequently stalled by such oversights as forgetting to ask one another’s name or address.

But Ansa and Holappa’s romance is not played only for comedy; ridiculous as they are, they are made fully developed characters, and their clumsy search for love and connection is made touching as well as absurd, in a deft combination of comedy and personal drama. The two lead actors do excellent work with their comically understated devotion. Visually, the film is full of urban drabness; the soundtrack also helps to set the tone, using classical and traditional Finnish music, along with some inappropriately cheery pop music, to ornament select scenes.

Where music is not present, most of the background sound consists of news reports on the war in Ukraine, giving an inescapable touch of harsh reality to humdrum and romantic scenes alike. There are also occasional nods to the director’s favourite movies, including the couple’s distinctly unromantic choice of film for their first date and a friendly dog named Chaplin.

While enjoyable as a comedy, Kaurismäki’s script also includes commentary, as heartfelt as it is funny, on the depressing struggles of the poor and lonely. Ansa’s dogged coping with a chronically inadequate income, jobs that keep vanishing from under her, and the painful inadequacy of her home’s furnishings are funny but relatable. Ansa’s and Holappa’s isolation and their attempts to overcome loneliness and make a human connection are dealt with even more sympathetically, in spite of the hopeless muddle they tend to make of it. The film is genuinely funny and does not hesitate to ridicule, but it is raised to another level by the thread of empathy that runs through even the most absurd situations.