La petite marchande d'allumettes

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.

A stylish short-film updating of the popular Hans Christian Andersen fairy-tale accompanied by a score that includes excerpts from two celebrated classical pieces – Wagner's "The Walkyrie" and Moussorgsky's "Night On Bald Mountain". Catherine Hessling (naturally) is an affecting if over-age lead and, once again, the film was originally longer but its initial run was interrupted by a plagiarism suit and it was only two years later that it was eventually re-released as we know it today!

While obviously commenting on the class struggle and the inevitable hand of fate – themes which, interestingly enough, resurfaced via a very similar plot-line in the first episode of Renoir's directorial swan song, the made-for-TV THE LITTLE THEATRE OF JEAN RENOIR (1970) – the accent here is once again on special effects enacting the titular character's dream sequence in a toy shop, which culminates in a chase across the skies involving the girl and two rival military officers on horseback (which, curiously enough, brought to mind the melodramatic excesses of the fantasy sequences in the later Powell & Pressburger films!

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.

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.

La Petite Marchande D'Allumettes is another of Renoir's bleak portrayals of meek and meager lives at odds with their milieu. Something about it though feels like a re-hashing of earlier Renoir works (Une Vie and La Fille...even Nana). This piece was filmed in the Vieux-Colombier and produced by Tedesco. I conjecture (or just straight up fantasize) that the pair brainstormed on a film concept that was to be "suited" for Renoir and Hessling together. I imagine the idea of adapting a famous tale (Andersen's short story) as a compromise (never a great way to produce art imo)... and what you get is something not quite original in any way whatsoever. Now, that isn't to say that the French Impressionist film techniques used in the hallucination sequences are not constructed and crafted with technical precision and genius intuition... but that it was already fertile ground for Renoir (and Hessling for that matter). I have previously hypothesized that some of Renoir's silent work was prophecy and prognostication through forming a death allegory between human freedom and the film industry itself. This may have been the last time that Renoir favored a stylistic system constructed around a protagonist's psychology and showcasing avant-garde editing techniques (impossible to say without a full print of Le Tournoi available). Certainly, Renoir's next film, Tire au Flanc would begin a shift toward a dominant stylistic system and diegetic construction (characterized by depth of field, mobile framing, multiple protagonists, etc.) that marked Renoir as a unique and exceptional filmmaker. Interesting also, that it was not sound film production that spurred this stylistic shift for Renoir as Tire was a silent film (although, I do believe it may have been the imminence of sound film that also had Renoir thinking one step ahead).