Carlos Gardel sings a tango written by himself and Alfredo Lepera in Fallen leavesby Aki Kaurismäki, who to date has become the big favorite to win the Palme d’Or next Saturday.
Who follows the Finnish director of Le Havre AND a man with no past You know, you know Finn’s taste for our tango and our football. There are no mentions of Maradona here, as in Kaurismäki’s previous productions, but Carlitos can be heard singing bitter slum.
Tango is not the only thing that distinguishes Kaurismäki’s cinema. He is one of the few directors whose film you see a frame and recognize it is his. The colours, the scenography, the shadows and even the performances are stylistic hallmarks of the Finn.
Another director with similar authorship conditions? Wes Anderson, who we will see here, also in the race, City of Asteroidswhich we will talk about tomorrow.
Kaurismäki and Wes Anderson: unique
Kaurismäki’s characters are lonely, often financially struggling and living in precarious situations. Ansa and Holappa are working class, and due to different circumstances they end up fired from their jobs, she from the supermarket and he from his job as a metallurgist.
Melancholic and sensitive, the director brings them together and coincidence and bad luck coincide when Holappa loses the slip with the phone number of the woman whose name he doesn’t even know. He does it at the door of the cinema they went to see The dead don’t cryby Jim Jarmusch, and Kaurismäki’s humor are the order of the day, with homages to Bresson or Chaplin.
Kaurismäki’s world is unique and unrepeatable, whether or not news of the war in Ukraine sneaks into the radios of the 1950s: that aspect so characteristic of his films, even if they take place in a present and unrecognizable Helsinki.
Among the Cannes regulars, Kaurismäki -like Marco Bellocchio- has never won the Palme d’Or, who knows, this year he will be given one of them. In other words, they give it to them.
It’s hardly the same with Jessica Hausner and her Club Zeroalthough this year’s jury president Ruben Östlund might like it, who is also a member of our compatriot Damiano Szifron.
The director, winner of two Palme d’Ors in the last six years, for the square AND The triangle of sadnessHe likes surprising situations, characters that are certainly not extraordinary, but who (re)discover themselves by performing unexpected actions.
And a lot is inside Club Zero. A teacher arrives at a high school to educate her students on the benefits of mindful eating. Miss Novak (Mia Wasikowskasomething unrecognizable is the Alice in Wonderland by Tim Burton) explains that if they eat less it will be better for the planet, for their physical, mental and spiritual health, they will feel freer and less dependent on consumerism.
All good, until everything starts to go wrong. Elsa, for example, has an eating disorder, and even though her mother eats almost nothing and gives it to her Beagle puppy, it’s not the same to eat and vomit, and then eat the vomit.
No, that’s not what the Beagle does. Elsa does.
The film talks about mutual manipulations, in a phase of life like adolescence in which everything seems possible. The Austrian director of Little Joe, also in competition at Cannes, makes his characters declaim rather than talk. Everything seems too studied, careful, in a work whose theme, with another approach, could bring the viewer closer instead of pushing him away.
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Source: Clarin
