Amazon.com video review:
The most compact and stylistically
impressive of Aki Kaurismäki's perversely minimalist Finnish comedies,
The Match Factory Girl stars his blond, blank-faced Garbo, Kati
Outinen, as a downtrodden factory worker whose attempts to discover
love and companionship are constantly thwarted by her possessive
parents and a succession of cloddish, exploitative men. Kaurismäki's
deadpan style--the carefully inexpressive acting, motionless camera,
and rigidly geometrical compositions--avoids both sentimentality and
sarcasm. Although the girl's plight is taken seriously, there is
something in the extremity of the situations, and in the lovingly
depicted hideousness of her Helsinki home life, that is irresistibly
comic. Inspired by the Tiananmen Square uprising, the match factory
girl resolves to take a revolutionary stand, arms herself with a
packet of rat poison, and sets out for revenge. The video includes an
equally hilarious music-video rendition of "Those Were the Days" by
Kaurismäki's house band, the Leningrad Cowboys. --Dave Kehr
