La fiammiferaia

Matches here are a metaphor for undistinguished short lives, and work well to propel Aki Kaurismaki's sere, reductionist story. He clearly works well with lead actress Kati Outinen, and the predictability of the tale is deliberate so as to force the viewer to confront the unsaturated colors, the paint that needs re-doing, the absence of empathy, the rarity of anything in the lead character's life to cling to or believe in. While themes, aesthetics and behaviors on display here are characteristically Nordic, Kaurismaki's manner, set-ups, and potent understatement are his alone and in top-shelf form. One wants a larger oeuvre from him.

But a masterful minimalist portrait of a woman taking one of the few options open to her. "Iiris" is a Dickensian heroine: beset with a brute of a step father, loving a wealthy cad who turns cold when she expects warmth, and reaching out to a distant brother who loves her but cannot provide the family she seeks. Overall her world is so bleak, cold and mean that the universal comment I heard after the movie screened was "Thank God I'm not Finnish!". This is a 20th century telling of the tale of the Little Match Girl so the end fits modern sensabilities.

The humor of this comedy is easy to miss as you watch it play out, but on retrospect it comes through loud and strong.

My personal highlight of the movie was the use of song and music to propel the action. Not having a clue about Finnish pop music, I'm sure I'm missing some elements, but the subtle themes come across quite well.

A riveting early masterpiece by Aki Kaurismaki. Kati Outinen is extraordinary as Iris, the long-faced factory worker of the title, who lives with her truly appalling parents in (probably) Helsinki. She cooks the meals and does all the housework, while they completely ignore her, preferring to watch TV and drink. Iris buys a dress and goes to a party - everybody ignores her there as well, and her scandalised mother forces her to take the dress back to the shop. A middle-class man picks her up in a bar and sleeps with her, and then leaves the next morning. She informs him that she's pregnant; he sends her a cheque and a note saying "Get rid of it." She quietly and inexorably starts to revenge herself on the world.

There's not much dialogue, but you don't need it; the camera stays on Outinen's mesmerisingly gloomy face. Iris is possibly the least glamorous heroine in movie history, but without apparently doing anything, Outinen shows all of Iris' hope, despair and the consciousness that it's going to get worse before it gets better. A great movie; since Fassbinder's death, they don't make many like these anymore.

With THE MATCH FACTORY GIRL Kaurismaki might not tread new ground but instead perfects the stylistic hallmarks that marked him apart from most other directors of his generation. His work is that of a sculptor, hacking away at all the cinematic fat, shaping form by removing that which is not necessary. His movies as an extension of his sculptory approach attain an almost hypnotic quality - or perhaps boring uneventfulness for others. He's not at all trying to hit emotionally draining highs and lows but build a rhythmic lull, a soothing pace created of flows and ebbs that move with imperceptible change. As a result, his movies never hurry to get anywhere fast and when they get there not a whole lot happens. It's all about appreciating how they got there and the stylistic subtleties of that journey.

THE MATCH FACTORY GIRL finds Kaurismaki shunning dialogue even more than previous efforts, if that's even possible without making a modern silent picture. Which it pretty much is. The entirety of the dialogue doesn't amount to more than 1 minute and that too is used more as a form of punctuation to the images - he could easily have done the movie completely without dialogues if he so wanted. The story could have been summed up in a 20 minute short yet Kaurismaki stretches it to 65 minutes, a meagre duration by most people's standards, which here feels like a good 90 minutes.

Although the material is perhaps the most bleak and brooding he had done at that point in his career since his debut CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, it is spiced up by moments of his trademark glacial humour. A certain scene in bar involving a drunk, sleazy patron and rat poison had me laughing out loud, which is a minor success for a film of this kind. The most dramatic scenes are delivered with that same kind of deadpan unaffection that immediately acquires a serio-comic air for that reason.

Although it lacks the playfulness of its predecessor (ARIEL), this is still Kaurismaki in top visual form. He has a way with images and how he orchestrates them that is quite unparalleled at his level. Sure he's not a director of epic works and spectacle but he's carved a niche for himself over the years that has his name and particular sensibilities written all over it and he's been content to work within it. If you like his style, this is a safebet. If you're a newcomer I'd suggest starting with something like ARIEL.

Iris is a young Finnish girl whose life has no horizon. She works in a match factory and still lives at her parents'. She escapes by reading soppy love stories or by attending a dance. One night, she thinks she has found Prince Charming. But the latter reveals himself a scornful human being who has no consideration for her. Then, she is chased away by her parents and relies on her brother's generosity to put her up. But Iris didn't say her last word and she decides to prepare a plan to have a revenge on the ones who couldn't love her.

In the nineteenth Century, Andersen, a Danish writer wrote a tale entitled "the little match girl". Here, the film-maker Aki Kaurismäki kept certain elements of this tale to create in his own way, a sort of updated version. And it's a much more austere one so much that it virtually evokes Robert Bresson's cinema. This is how I perceive "the Match Factory Girl" (1990): a cross between a modernized version of Andersen's tale and Bresson's cinema for the straight-forward style and the intense austerity in which the story bathes.

Aki Kaurismäki seems to have understood that to give his movie a big dramatic intensity, ostentation and exaggeration were to be excluded. The amount? A grievous movie which hurts where everything in the cinema writing is reduced to simplicity, nearly stillness and despair. This, to better express the dreary world in which Iris is prisoner and the wrong hopes she comes up against. Barely camera movements (the movie nearly looks like a succession of paintings), sinister scenery, blue-green lighting, dumb or merciless characters blend themselves to create a universe impenetrable to happiness. To plunge more in this desolate world, Kaurismäki nearly shot a silent movie, only scattered by laconic and reduced in the extreme dialogs. But to tell the truth, dialogs are not the most important thing. Looks matter more and reveal best the characters' thoughts and feelings.

The director's sympathy towards Iris and making her put up at her brother's are the only pities he shows and his movie would be of a total blackness if there wasn't humor. A humor which acts in an ironic way: "I came to tell you goodbye...".

Overrall, this grave movie about the lack of love strikes right at the heart and its vision is rather difficult. If you are down in the dumps, save it for a better day. It's a short movie (hardly an hour) but Iris' pale and retiring countenance stays rooted for a long time in the spectator's brain. And Kati Outinen, impressive of fragility and sensitiveness is perfect in this role.