The Decline of Arthouse Cinemas and the Impact on Avant-Garde Films: A Case Study with “Fallen Leaves” and Aki Kaurismaki’s Anti-Commercial Style

The extinction or absence of arthouse cinemas forces experimental avant-garde films to be released in commercial cinemas, with unknown results. Often ruin.

Thus, at the screening I attended of Fallen Leaves there were three people.

The Finnish director’s film Aki Kaurismaki, an Oscar candidate, is deliberately anti-commercial, emphatically authorial, not at all easy or designed to please the public. On the contrary, it seeks in it a kind of receptacle for questions that the director himself has probably asked himself, without being able to solve them satisfactorily (perhaps because they do not have answers).

To do this, he rehearses on the screen a language that seems inspired by the paintings of Edward Hooper. Urban scenarios without movement or life. Sordid rooms. Dark streets. Workshops, machinery… Solitary characters, of few words, closed in on themselves, imprisoned in an existential philosophy in which not the slightest hint of humor emerges, although there is some spark of tenderness, and in whose souls loneliness nests, occupying so much space that It barely leaves room for other feelings.

The argument of Fallen leaves narrates extremely slowly, the camera recreating all sorts of minimalist details, the stammering love story between a woman who will be fired from successive jobs because of precarious and unfair legislation for Finnish workers, and a man who The same thing happens – one layoff after another; but, in his case, because of alcohol.

Towards the end of this story without a plot, like a succession of episodes taken from one’s own and always disordered life, among the Finnish mists of this very Nordic film, a pale light that may have What to do with love. I say “perhaps” because the author will give up developing the happiness of the protagonists, leaving them just as alone as at the beginning, although accompanying at least each other and appearing in the last shot – with their backs to the viewer, the two walk away along a huge, empty boulevard – heading towards something like the future.

Art and essay.

2024-01-16 06:04:07
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