La piccola fiammiferaia

Jean Renoir's "The Little Match Girl" despite being only about 32 minutes (although some sources list it as 40 minutes, the version circulating online isn't as long) is still an extended, loose reworking of Hans Christian Andersen's short, fairy-tale poem. The first obvious difference is that the "Karen," as played by Catherine Hessling, the director's wife, is not a little girl, but rather a woman in her twenties. Granted, the silent era was a time when adult stars the likes of Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish often played childhood roles or perpetual ingénues, but the casting here is striking relative to other cinematic adaptations of the short story, which had already been made into films in 1902 and 1914, at least. It should also be noted that the original French title, "La petite marchande d'allumettes," better translates as "The Little Match Seller." The casting also opens the story up for a quasi-love triangle involving Karen's infatuation with a well-dressed man and her interactions with a policeman, both of whom are also reflected in the film's extended death dream. Her matchstick hallucinations actually get comparatively short shrift this outing, which I'm not fond of given the projected visions' power as cinematic metaphor, but Renoir largely makes up for this with that dream sequence, which pulls out all the tricks from the era of French Impressionist filmmaking.

There is use of miniatures for the shack, practical effects are employed for a falling tree, actors play living dolls, and the wintry city sets are effective. The adjustments of lens focus, use of substitution-splices and, most of all, multiple-exposure photography or matte work creates some impressive impressionistic effects. The chase on horseback in the sky in particular is haunting. What else stood out to me viewing this after having already seen the single-scene 1902 adaptation by James Williamson, as well as the 1914 version, is how masterful film technique had became in the 1920s, especially in the hands of a great filmmaker like Renoir, as well as his cinematographer Jean Bachelet. The views and continuity editing based around looks is exceptional. A lot of glossy close-ups, eyeline matches, point-of-view and subjective shots and images framed through windows--and that's just before the matchstick hallucinations and extended dream sequence.

Casting an adult woman also works rather well to modernize Andersen's mid-19th-century tale. It extends the polemic beyond a cry to charity for the idealized blameless child, sharpening the critique on modern urbanity and capitalism. Automobiles and novelty toys are incorporated. My only complaint besides not more time being spent on the matchstick visions is that it's not clear why Karen doesn't go back to her shack. This is explained in other versions with her father and, sometimes, her mother being abusive, and I wonder whether this film weren't originally longer to provide such a reason. Someone else's arm--perhaps the father--can be seen when Karen exits the shack, but in the version I saw no such character remains. Anyways, Hessling was surely a more capable actress, too, than a child would have been, even if I'm not necessarily impressed by her reliance on head bobs and bug eyes. No longer simply playing to the Christian, nostalgic and paternal instincts of Andersen's sermon to save the children, when Renoir's Karen inevitably dies, she receives no sympathy in this world.

While short and perhaps lacking in real pathos (for me), this is a great example of the sheer imaginative fun that movies rarely possess nowadays. From a horse-back sword fight in the sky to snow that turns into fruit, fantasy reigns supreme in this film. Catherine Hesslinger is captivating in the lead role (though she is even more remarkable in the less interesting "Charleston"). Seeing these silent shorts of Renoir's have helped me understand how he was capable of putting so many wonderful, unusual scenes into "The Rules of the Game"; I see how playful he was. Above all, one takes away Renoir's exuberant love for film in this movie. You can find it in the 7 film set released by Lion's Gate with remarks by Scorsese.

This is adapted from the Hans Christian Andersen story about a neglected, destitute matchbox girl who turns to light for a last flight of fancy. So how to transmute suffering into something that matters and we can take from?

It's so perfectly tailored for cinematic language of the time, sentimental but not daft; an outer story about hard-hitting emotional drama, ostensibly realistic but itself imbued with the afterglow of fairy-tales, and the canvas nested inside the mind that permits all manner of fantastic associations between the two fantasies.

The cruel father who sends her out to sell every night, is beautifully rendered as only a dark silhouette behind a window. Once out in the snowed street, the only one who notices the girl is the policeman. In their brief moment of intimacy before a shopping window they identify each other as toys behind the glass panel. It's good to note the distance they feel separates them, and therefore prohibits the romance, because it's repeated, then reversed inside the fantasy. They are again faraway, but eventually - imagined - very close.

The fantasy is brilliant, but first seems rather uninspired, the magic uncinematically transferred to the set design. But what seems at first as stuffy is revealed to be stuffy for a reason; the feeling is one of stasis and regression, the toys are life-like in size, so the girl reduced to their stature, hiding among them, finally finding love that extricates from the infantile level. Then a premonition of Death as the casting of the first shadow, here is where it soars and takes to the skies.

This second part truly amazes; Renoir does not merely transmute on the symbolic level by transferring notions between worlds, he transmutes for the eye as well. This heavenly world is in flux, rapid, violent. So we have a delirious flight of fancy as the couple flees from Death, a struggle, and eventually the capitulation.

You can read all of this as the wish-fulfillment of a suffering mind, the fluid dream world providing guidance from inside, or a spiritual blueprint with those things nested inside of it.

Eventually the cross, the rod of suffering, is transmuted in the tree of new life. We may think the blossoms spring up wistfully, because the fairy-tale calls for it, and perhaps for the filmmakers they were merely the proper symbols, but it is not quite so. Fairy-tales communicate something of our very soul, not the opposite. A common soul on her journeys through the world.

So, on an unconscious level, a sacrifice here points the road to the required breakthrough. The girl growing into a woman, then growing out of that too, and is a river its bank or the flowing water? Watch it again.

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.