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26 out of 32 people found the following comment useful :- Wanna know about Finnish culture? Watch this film..., 16 June 2003 Author: AslaugRuotsalainen from Denmark
Where to begin telling about this film? Throwing imaginary roses to Kaurismäki who has yet again showed all what a fantastic creator of films he really is?.No one can as he describe Finnish culture in such a deep and sensitive, yet rough, way. He touches the string of our culture, our way of thinking and behaving in this special "silent" way as only he masters. In his films talking isn't done by words only but surely there's plenty of communication!This film is beyond doubt my personal favorite (also the lastest film by Kaurismäki, Mies Ilman Menneisyyttä, is totally fabulous!!) because there's not much dialogue (which we Finns aren't too keen of somehow) but there's plenty of meaning, plenty of human tragedy (which we also seem to be fond of!) and also a hint from Kaurismäki himself that certain things maybe could be different but all in all everything comes down to the quetion of culture and indeed Finnish culture is different from most other cultures especially in Scandinavia.Finns are often perceived as totally without oral skills almost not being able to talk however this is a fatal mistake to believe in. Finns just don't say anything if it's not necessary!! Why babble with no reason, why chat if it's not necessary..that's also why such a thing as the international wellknown concept of smalltalk is practically unknown here in Finland. It makes most Finns feel uneasy to talk if there's nothing real to talk about. But don't make the conclusion that Finns don't have feelings (even very deep ones!) and thoughts; that would be a fatal mistake. Finns are in everso many ways such a serious people that for most foreigners it looks like there's some sort of national depression going on but on the other hand when Finns party then they really party...Life here in Finland is simple although also hypermodern; it's two "worlds" living side by side and exactly this fact can be difficult for anyone from outside Finland to comprehend because it seems so weird, almost even awkward. What makes a Finn happy...well, a little wooden house by the lake to go to in the summer, your own sauna (which there's plenty of here), a long and everlasting relationship and a cosy home...nothing fancy is high on the list of finnish "dreams of happiness"..maybe it sounded as I would generalize but sometimes it's necessary to make your point of view clear to "foreigners" who've never visited Finland.The film itself shows a lot of how Finland still is...what things are all about; it contains strong emotions although it might not seem so at first. To some the film might even seem boring but beyond all those visible things there's a whole world of unsaid and in this particular film also undone things. In a stange way it contains as well the deepest seriousness as humour even though it is quite invisible to the eye. And however strange it may sound the film contains also love and deep passion; the scene where "Satumaa" is being played (just before Iris is picked up by the police) says it all! That's concequence, justice, love and real passion all in one small scene.Maybe one needs to be a Finn (or a true Fennofile) to get something real out of watching this film but indeed it is worthwhile and if you're gonna buy it do please buy it on DVD because if you like it (and you definately will) a VHS won't last for that many replays...So watch it and get wiser on Finnish culture; I give it all the stars possible, it really is a masterpiece of the very rare. It really is a film with a meaning and it surely has a message to all of us.Yet again "Bravo Kaurismäki" for placing Finland on the filmic worldmap...
18 out of 19 people found the following comment useful :- no love, no future, a desire for revenge, 5 May 2005 Author: dbdumonteil
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.
15 out of 17 people found the following comment useful :- Life will never seem as bad again, 22 September 2000 Author: trilobee from NZ
Kaurismaki is nothing if not an efficient director. The stylistic elements of 'The Match Factory Girl' are distilled, like the vodka that is drunk throughout, to produce an intense and disturbing effect. Much of the action goes on outside the characteristically static camera frame, and Kati Outinen's deadpan face conveys a correspondingly broad range of expressions (she is excellent at signalling imminent vomiting without appearing to twitch a muscle). It's a film that moves on and out with the minimum of movement and dialogue, and its downwards pull is mesmerising. It's also bitterly funny. Late in the film the main character, Iris, approaches the shop counter and asks for a bottle of rat poison, to which the reply is: 'Small or large?'I was fairly low when I saw this film. I came out feeling marvellous. Another triumph for the relief to be found in misery, a paradox which Kaurismaki cheerfully exploits in his dark, tragic & hilarious films.
11 out of 11 people found the following comment useful :- A brilliant deadpan tragedy, 26 April 1999 Author: Lexo-2 from Ireland
*** This comment may contain spoilers ***
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.
9 out of 10 people found the following comment useful :- A brilliant deadpan tragedy, 26 April 1999 Author: Lexo-2 from Ireland
8 out of 9 people found the following comment useful :- The Irony of Silence in a Noisy World, 15 July 2003 Author: bluesdoctor from A Place is Just A Place
Only the story is allowed to tell itself: A classic tale of a woman wronged told straight as can be, without the least adornment, comedy, or any other form of commentary from the film maker. The film begins with several minutes of pure images, no dialogue, and when words are in fact first spoken, they're almost painful. Kati Outinen, Kaurismäki's constant leading lady, looks even more forlorn than usual, her face swollen, her upper lip red and eyes bleary, as if she just finished crying. Salt of the earth, her one break from an otherwise bleak and desolate existence, a brief affair with a callous man of higher social status, ends badly. Events proceed with clocklike fatalism, a simplicity and inevitability that recall a Broadside ballad, a primeval tale.
10 out of 14 people found the following comment useful :- Incredibly depressing - and highly enjoyable, 19 September 1999 Author: mark-506 from LA, CA
Short, simple, almost completely free of dialogue, "The Match Factory Girl" is perhaps cinema at its purest form. How brave to create a film where the viewer is forced to watch the poor heroine spiral down further and further into wretchedness, all the way to the bottom, with a wry smile and deadpan detachment all the way. But just because the movie's tone is cold and standoffish doesn't mean it's unaffecting. I saw this movie over 5 years ago and the memory of it still ties my heart in a knot.
9 out of 13 people found the following comment useful :- Horrible tragedy with great comic timing., 13 March 2002 Author: seltzer (lizard.nai@rcn.com) from Newington, CT
I saw this film many years ago at a local university-run cinema, and I thought it was the most brilliant comedy I had ever seen. The timing of the actors and the pacing of the scenes lent a weird feel to the movie. It was like the elements of a tragedy were being presented with a certain comic flair. Of course, I was the only one in the theater laughing, so I could be wrong, but it struck me as a completely flat comedy, with the story itself not giving out the usual comic clues. I claim either total admiration for Aki Kaurismaki or ignorance. In either case, it was very compelling.
10 out of 15 people found the following comment useful :- Wanna know about Finnish culture? Watch this film..., 16 June 2003 Author: AslaugRuotsalainen from Denmark
4 out of 4 people found the following comment useful :- An interesting film from Kaurismäki, but not one that I would rate as a masterpiece, 18 April 2008 Author: Graham Greene from United Kingdom
The Match Factory Girl (1990) was the final part of director Aki Kaurismäki's informal trilogy of films dealing with the day-to-day grind of working class characters on the fringes of society. The first two instalments were Shadows in Paradise (1986), in which a lonely bin man begins a relationship with a no-nonsense shop assistant in the hope of finding an escape from his repetitive, directionless existence, and Ariel (1988), wherein an unemployed man sets out for the bright lights of Helsinki and finds himself caught up in a series of delightfully picaresque adventures. For me, The Match Factory Girl was the least interesting and least successful of the three; lacking the broader elements of comedy found in the first film or the skillful story-telling and unconventional directorial touches of the second. It is still worth experiencing, and indeed, the rest of the reviews here are filled with glowing praise and rapturous acclaim, but for me, it simply failed to captivate me like many of Kaurismäki's other, more ambitious projects.The film is typical of the director's idiosyncratic style, with flat, deadpan performances, minimalist dialog, simplistic storytelling and an interesting juxtaposition between drab, naturalistic production design and warm cinematography. There are also the usual Kaurismäki preoccupations with 50's iconography, the use rock and roll music and melodramatic popular song to both punctuate and comment upon the story as it unfolds, and the uncomfortable moments of contemplative silence that propel the story without the usual need for dialog and character interaction. Indeed, this would seem to be one of the main concerns of The Match Factory Girl, with the lack of communication between the characters pushing the film into a darker territory that we might not usually expect. I don't think it is handled quite as well as it could have been, and indeed, at times felt reminiscent of the director's first film, the contemporary-set adaptation of Crime and Punishment (1983). Like Crime and Punishment, The Match Factory Girl opens with a repetitive and mechanical montage showing the central character's work, as a lump of wood is cut down, filed, processed and sorted through machine after machine, until a single file of little tiny matches pass on a conveyor belt before being boxed and sorted by the shy and dowdy Iris.The central performance from Kati Outinen is as good as you could expect from Kaurismäki's work, filled with empathy and a heartbreaking pathos that permeates the very centre of this sad and tragic tale. What most impresses us about the actress is her ability to suggest so much about the character without the use of predictable dialog; with her monotonous daily routine and lack of any kind of joy or colour at both work and home reflected in her face, movements and body language. Her most lengthy piece of dialog is heard in voice over, as she dictates a letter that she is writing to a man that she has recently had a one night stand with, and hopes that he might want to get in touch with her, not only for her own sake, but the sake of the baby that she is carrying. It is a completely heartbreaking sequence, and the only occasion wherein we get a sense of Iris as an intelligent and bright young woman able to express her thoughts and feelings eloquently. Few of the other characters in the film say more than two or three lines of dialog throughout the comparatively short sixty-odd minute running time, which seems to simply reinforce the uncomfortable and tragic loneliness at the centre of this character's life.However, where the film failed to work for me was in the presentation of the last ten to fifteen minutes, in which the emphasis on social-realist clichés and Kaurismäki's typically deadpan approach to character and drama gave way to a darker aspect that I felt was underdeveloped. Some have drawn comparisons with this film to Michael Haneke's similarly cold examinations into social dissatisfaction and cultural alienation in films like The Seventh Continent (1989) and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994), particularly in the way in which Kaurismäki uses the relentless background chatter of radio reports and TV news footage of the escalating violence of the protests in Beijing and the Tiananmen Square incident to foreground the narrative, whilst simultaneously foreshadowing later events and the eventual theme of defiance. However, at only a fraction over an hour in length, these ideas felt unfinished and somewhat rushed, with the really interesting notions of the film only really coming to our attention during the third and final act.The ending is no doubt an ironic swipe at Hollywood film-making, in which the emphasis seems to be on tying together loose ends and closing the book on the very last page. Here, Kaurismäki gives us an ending that suggests so much without ever spelling things out. It's a nice touch, in keeping with his usual approach to storytelling, but again, for me, felt somewhat underdeveloped. Other viewers haven't had such problems, but having arrived at this film after two of my very favourite Kaurismäki films, Hamlet Goes Business (1987) and Ariel, both of which I consider to be early masterpieces, I probably expected too much. Regardless, The Match Factory Girl is an interesting enough film from Kaurismäki, one that shows the continuation of his typical approach to cinema and his various thematic concerns - and one that is certainly worth experiencing, if only for the unconventional lead performance from Kati Outinen - but one that I also feel is something of less successful retread of Crime and Punishment and Shadows in Paradise.
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