Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatjana

Brisk and Beautiful.

If Fallen Leaves really is Aki Kaurismäki’s final film, what a loss for us all.

I’ve been looking back at the Finnish legend’s films, which have been compared to those of Jim Jarmusch, but also remind me a bit of Wes Anderson’s—stylistically bold, somewhat stilted, and, most profoundly, preoccupied with different permutations of existential loneliness.

Fallen Leaves is a perfect specimen of a typical Kaurismäki project. Set in industrial Helsinki—most of his films seem to have these sorts of “on the fringes of society” settings—his film chronicles the unlikely romance between a lonely woman who works at a grocery store and an alcoholic construction worker. It’s a brisk and pretty straightforward picture, but it’s also classically Kaurismäkian in its quirked up approach to urban anxieties. Both struggle with unemployment, an inability to communicate, and an inner rage that’s inevitable when you spend your life searching for something, anything, to give it value. I loved it, but perhaps not as much as I loved another Kaurismäki I recently watched: Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatjana.

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At 63 minutes, Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatjana is a delightful little romance with that underlining sadness that seems to run through each of the director’s works. It follows two stunted middle aged men, Valto and Reino, on a roadtrip to nowhere in specific.

They’re escaping their mothers—Valto locks his in a cupboard after she refuses to make him coffee—but also boredom and purposelessness. It’s a simple set-up, and the film is meandering up until the point that they meet two women at a bar: Tatjana who is from Estonia and Klavdia from Russia. Given the language gap, the conversations are limited and muted. The chemistry between the four, therefore, derives from something unsaid, a desire to be in each other’s company.

One night Tatjana rests her head on Reino’s—the quieter guy and a heavy vodka drinker—shoulder. Although there are few words exchanged, something has shifted over their few encounters. But their hunger for one another, for romance, never feel contrived or convenient. It’s a Kaurismäki special, whimsical and magical and hopeful and necessary. It’s the natural next step in these loners existences. If only we can all be so lucky.

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Lately I’ve developed an allergy to anything too quirked-up, and while Kaurismäki’s pictures do have elements of Manic Pixie Dream Finns, they’re always a fine remedy to my recurring fears about city life.

Watching Fallen Leaves, I kept thinking, maybe a little smugly, that I deserve a fucking prize for living in New York, for struggling and drinking a bit too much and trying to meet someone, anyone, who will offer recess from the specific type of loneliness that only exists in a densely-packed cityscape.