Even though Aki Kaurismaki has won every award going and is a household name in his native Finland, where he is treated like a god, it may be that you’ve never heard of him. He is the business. He specialises in understated dramas about deadpan losers whose hopes are often crushed, but who somehow find comfort. If that doesn’t sell it, try this: he is so briskly clear-eyed that his films never outstay their welcome and his latest, Fallen Leaves, runs to just 81 minutes. Could we love him more? Might he not be our favourite auteur of all time?

Kaurismaki somehow suffuses every frame with feeling

Fallen Leaves, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes and is Finland’s submission for the Oscars, has a straightforward premise that isn’t original by any means: can two lonely people find each other? But his take is original, if hard to explain. Kaurismaki somehow suffuses every frame with feeling, even if his storytelling is so pared back it is almost unfeeling. It’s the opposite of melodrama, whatever that is. The film follows two main characters. One is Ansa (Alma Poysti), a middle-aged woman who lives alone in a Helsinki apartment and loses her supermarket job when a belligerent security guard discovers she’s hidden an expired sandwich in her handbag. Meanwhile, across town, Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), a lanky metal-worker, is fired from a construction site due to an accident that his boss blames on his drinking. Actually, it was due to faulty machinery, but it’s true that Holappa is an alcoholic with vodka stashed in his locker. The pair first meet in a karaoke bar. They clock each other but don’t speak. The script is so spare it probably only runs to a couple of pages, but every moment is imbued with meaning and lonesomeness. I was often put in mind of Edward Hopper’s paintings.

The two next run into each other in the street, and from then on it’s a romance (of sorts) as they repeatedly connect and then lose each other. It is sometimes very funny, but you’ll have to take my word for it. I typed out a line that made me laugh at the cinema but in print it looks stupid. What happens in Kaurismaki’s world needs to stay there.

And it’s a world that is all his own. The film is set at a time unknown. The Ukraine-Russia war is on the radio but the phones are landlines with curly cords and there’s a poster for Brief Encounter outside the cinema. There is no fancy camerawork. Mostly, it stays still while characters talk to each other in a flattened, dour way. And the palette is exaggerated, with colours popping against deeply saturated backgrounds. Unlike Wes Anderson, however, Kaurismaki is not purely a stylist whose films are fundamentally empty. He has plenty to say about how people are able to care for each other in a world that does not care for them.

There isn’t a great deal of plot to unfold: Holappa is sacked from another job, Ansa finds new work in a factory, then there’s an accident. That’s pretty much the sum of it, although Ansa adopts a stray dog because, presumably, what are she and Holappa if not strays in search of good homes? Kaurismaki loves his characters and treats them with such respect and affection it’s like you’ve known them for all your life. Rather than just 81 minutes.