Aki Kaurismäki’s paradoxical conservatism. Labor, gender, love, and vitality in Fallen leaves

Abstract

We propose a study on Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen leaves (2023). We argue that the film is a cinematic reflection on how it is possible to persevere affectively in a contemporary world dominated by the logic of surplus value extraction through wage labor. After contextualizing this film within Kaurismäki’s work, which features a reflection on the contemporary labor world, we contend that his cinema involves a revaluation of romantic love. Although certainly depicted through traditional heterosexual motifs, it is a form of romantic love that implies a rupturist attempt to find a sort of affective refuge in the midst of a societal and worldly structure that tends towards the annihilation of vitality. Hence, we propose the idea of a “paradoxical conservatism” in the motifs of romantic love in Kaurismäki. We argue it is paradoxical, because the traditional forms of love through which Fallen leaves thinks involve modes of increase of affective power and not merely the maintenance of the status quo.