Ansa (Alma Pöysti) is a saleswoman in a supermarket. Neon signs with harsh industrial light in a supermarket. She is relieved by the piercing gaze of the security guard who pursues her. She feeds the homeless with expired food. She also steals an expired sandwich and gets kicked out. We are in Helsinki, in the middle of a neglected landscape.

2023 year. Ruined buildings, construction sites that expose the inner city. Ansa listening to sad tunes on a vintage radio (no one in the film seems to have anything so modern as a smartphone or TV — it could very well be set in the 60s); we don’t know how old Anne is. And oh, Ansa (Alma Poisty) never smiles. We see a vivid picture of everyday banality; in the store there are indifferent customers, zombified with worries and women with dark circles, in the rhythm of alienated work. “Let’s go to karaoke,” says construction worker Holappi (Jussi Vatanen), also a working-class, tall, silent, functional alcoholic working-class hero. “Tough guys don’t sing,” he replies.

And the tomboys, chipped, gelled, and cologned, go to the California Pub, a bar that looks like 70s East Berlin or Twin Peaks, with expressionless faces and misty poor-guy eyes. And there Holappa meets Ansa. They fall in love. Coup de foudre. But this is timid, recessive, melancholic, working-class love. Two bitter, two fallen leaves, in the Finnish autumn, which cleanses poverty and sadness with gusts of rain, like in noir films. How do we know Ansa and Holappa will be together? Because they have the same aura of subdued sweetness. Because both actors look like proletarian versions of Ingmar Bergman’s actors – the radiant but giddy, airy Alma Poisty plays Ansa as poor Bibi Andersson, who eats expired food; and Jussi Vatanen could be Max von Sydow’s clumsy brother (with a hint of Ryan Gosling).

We know they will be together because love is all they have. On the first date. I’m going to the movies for Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Don’t Die. Then to the zombie movie. Then she invites him to dinner, and here Kaurismäki’s comedy of loneliness appears. She needs to go to the store to buy… another plate for dinner. What are you doing that you don’t have a plate yet? You love a man. It’s just. Polite. Tender but comforting love. Anse’s room looks like a monk’s room, with a small bed, a dilapidated chair and that old radio that plays only news about the war in Ukraine. Finland is right on the border. But in “The Disgraced Letter” these gloomy, depressing news hover over the heroes like the top layer of misfortune. What do you do when you feel unhappy? You find Ansa, sit down and stop drinking. In an age of motion pictures, special effects and ridiculously complex narratives, Kaurismäki’s films are like traveling back in time, back to the strange excitement of the 90s.

Ansa goes to the Net Café to look for a job online. They both do not manifest. They are not sentimental. As if poverty had turned them into ghosts, into ephemera. We watch cartoons. They are constantly stumbling in their own lives. They can’t seem to meet, their love has obstacles. Jokes: He loses the note on which she wrote his phone number; he doesn’t want to give up vodka for her, and then falls into a ditch next to some posters of Tom Jones and Godard’s Alphaville. But there is pathos in this cartoonish love: “Mambo Italiano” is set in a bar full of other men who, with glazed eyes and sad smiley faces, seem lonely even when they are together. Bar melodies fill the atmosphere with feeling. And also many movie posters throughout the bar. He expresses emotions that the characters cannot express.

Their reserve, physical and verbal, makes them appear defeated, depressed or shocked by life. But behind them is a poster with Brigitte Bardot, sensual, greedy, carnal, seductive. Despite the instability and violence, in an industrial landscape where the soul seems to be evacuated, they tenderly love each other. Abandoned teddy bears next to garbage trucks and nasty dogs. In the city. The saddest things in the world. Chronic alcoholism, job loss, loneliness and despair. The soundtrack features ballads about climate change, disillusionment, death and cemeteries (with an emphasis on rain-soaked cemeteries). The boredom of the persecuted, the suffocating, the catatonia of the work done by the millions and millions of Anse and Holappaşi, the fallen leaves of the society that hurts them.

When her friend Liza indignantly says, “All men are pigs,” Ansa disagrees. “Pigs,” she says, “are intelligent and sensitive.” You can make a living as a pig. What’s life when you’re poor without an obedient pig grunting “I love you” to you? “Fallen Leaves” is a film about ordinary people who love. It has something of Chaplin, with “Modern Times”, a modern version. They survive in an increasingly impersonal and alien age. But they keep their humanity because they know how to love. Simple. In a pre-technological world where people still use landline phones, “Bronze Age” microwave ovens, and analog radios.