“Fallen Laves,” the Finnish entry for best international feature film this year, is the latest film from deadpan romantic minimalist Aki Kaurismaki (“The Match Factory Girl,” “The Man Without a Past”). The charming little effort makes a “meta” case for romance on the big screen and in our little lives and how the two interact. Ansa (Alma Poysti), the film’s romantic heroine, is a not very young worker at a Helsinki market, who gets canned for taking expired food headed for the garbage bin. Ansa lives alone in a small flat. Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), the film’s unlikely hero, drinks at work, where, dressed in a kind of primitive spacesuit, he sandblasts metal. Yes, it’s a hellish way to make a living, which might be why Holappa drinks while doing it. He gets caught boozing and gets fired. For a second, you might think the film is set in Communist Russia. The two characters suggest a pair of crushed proletariat types.

“Fallen Leaves” exists in a kind of permanent past, except that on TV and radio we hear news of what’s going on in Ukraine (Finland and Russia share a border).

In one of the film’s most romantic moments, Holappa sits passed out drunk at a train stop, and Ansa touches his face. She has managed to find a new job at a bar, where she works in a back room and clears tables when she is free. After the two meet, Ansa and Holappa go to the rundown local cinema where they watch Jim Jarmusch’s underrated 2019 zombie movie “The Dead Don’t Die.” Yes, the joke is they could be zombies themselves. Jarmusch is, of course, America’s Aki Kaurismaki. Or is it the other way around?

Outside, Ansa and Holappa stand beneath posters for films by Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard and David Lean’s romantic classic “Brief Encounter.” Kaurismaki is sending us all sorts of movie-related signals. Perhaps this explains why the film feels like such a throwback to the 50s-60s of the European New Wave. The two would-be lovers share a perhaps too grim dinner at Ansa’s place. She catches him taking slugs from a flask. Her father and brothers “died of drink,” she tells him. She won’t get involved with a drunk. But it is the whole point of movies to get people like Ansa and Holappa together to give us all hope.

Poysti, the award-winning lead in the 2020 Finnish biopic “Tove,” does not have to do much to suggest a complex inner life for Ansa. Her face is alive with thought. Vatanen, whose height gives him a shabby Max von Sydow air, has a hangdog look suitable to the withdrawn Holappa. We assume he drinks to blot out something terrible from his past. Ansa and Holappa are a perfect pair of potential lovers for the film’s Eastern European dystopia. The simple plot will also involve a lost phone number, mixed up addresses, a stray dog and a life-threatening accident. Will love conquer all? It’s a movie, right?

(“Fallen Leaves” contains substance abuse and mature themes)

Not Rated. In Finnish with subtitles. At the Coolidge Corner Theater. Grade: A-