La pequeña cerillera

A very stylish outing from Jean Renoir spun from a simple children's fable from Andersen into something even simpler but memorably bleak as well.

The little match girl of the title is not so little here in the beautiful Catherine Hessling giving a mesmerising performance for Renoir, who filmed her lovingly in soft or blurred focus throughout. The story moves logically from trying to sell matches to live to trying to light them to live, in between with a child-like pressed nose to a café then a toy shop's window to living the dream while freezing to death in the snow. When your time's up even sheltering from the falling snow under a single plank can be taken away from you. There's some great low-key fancy camera and set trickery in the toy shop dream sequence such as Karen dancing in slo-mo through nets, and lovely smoky visuals especially the life and death chase through the sky. It can sometimes remind you of a silent pop video - the crew must had have fun piecing it all together!

Although it doesn't say as much for human determination as Passion of Joan of Arc from the same year (what could!), I've always found anything by Renoir to be highly enjoyable, educational and a salutary lesson in how to make art not Art movies.

Little Match Girl, The (1928)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Jean Renoir's short film based on the story of Hans Christian Anderson features the director's then wife Catherine Hessling in the title role. The film tells the story of a poor girl who goes out on a snowy night to sell matches. She's unable to sell any and instead of going back to her shack, she stays out keeping warm from the matches. She strikes one lucky match and begins to see all sorts of strange things through a toy shop window. This film starts off pretty well but slowly gets boring as the surreal aspects of the story start to set in. The fantasy side of things are pretty good but it's clear Renoir was going for something a tad bit surreal and the budget just didn't allow for this to work. All of the fantasy sequences are good on their own but none of them are done well enough to really work. Hessling is much too old to be playing the character but she is able to bring an innocence to the role.

This short early silent from the French master Renoir shows a good deal of imagination on the director's part – although not in terms of casting: he once more looked no further than his then wife Catherine Hessling whom he was trying to build into a star for the lead role. Hessling is too old for the part, but at times she does manage to convey a degree of innocence required for the role, even if it does mean her performance borders on the (deliberately) comical at times. This being an adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson's tragic short story, these brief light-hearted moments are at odds with the general theme.

The second part of the film veers off into fantasy as we're treated to the girl's childlike fantasies as she slowly freezes to death. Again, there's a good deal of imagination gone into this sequence, but it does become a little repetitive after a while. The spectre of Death, initially in the form of a Jack-in-the-Box, looms over the fantasies, however, until the film climaxes with a concisely edited chase sequence on horseback.

This is a curious choice of story for Renoir, and it obviously doesn't reach the standard of his later output. However, it possesses a Gallic charm that sets it apart from most films of the era, and is worth catching simply to see a master of cinema near the beginning of his cinematic career.

Although this version hits on many of the points in the original story, there is no doubt that this is director Jean Renoir's very own interpretation. He perhaps outdoes Hans Christian Andersen in conveying a harsh reality with little or no recompense. The finale is heavy laden with symbolism of which might have been some influence to Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane". Renoir himself seems to have been influenced by Andersen's "Steadfast Tin Soldier" and Victor Herbert's "Babes in Toyland(1903)". And the life size dolls remind one of Maria in "Metropolis(German, 1927)". The New Year's story should be familiar to most- one sorrowful day in the life of a poor girl, without happiness at home nor on the job. This particular adaption presents a girl much older than seen elsewhere and is set in the present. Ranks a close third behind the 1937 cartoon and the near perfect 1986 British musical film. With sound effects and music, the latter used particularly well with a rendition of Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries", which of course(to Western fans)was also used with great results in My Name Is Nobody(Italian, 1974). The video edition viewed had fair to good picture quality.

I just stumbled on this early and silent Renoir short (along with the delightfully bizarre 'Sur un air de Charleston') on a DVD of 'La Grand Illusion' and, really, I think I love it more even than that great film.

It's loosely based on 'The Little Match Girl' but owes as much to 'The Nutcracker'; a poor match-seller (played by Mrs. Renoir, the absolutely gorgeous and appealing Catherine Hessling, who can also be seen in 'Charleston'), overcome with hunger and cold, hallucinates the inhabitants of a toyshop window coming to life around her. I imagine the animation and other special effects must have been fairly pioneering - I'm certain they're more spellbinding than anything CGI could do - and the result is magical, enchanting, heartbreaking.

The version I saw had a haunting, note-perfect accordion soundtrack by Marc Perrone.

Much as I love his other work I could almost wish Renoir had gone on like this; I could wish cinema had gone on like this.