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The Little Match Girl More at IMDbPro »La petite marchande d'allumettes (original title)
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| Index | 15 reviews in total |
3 out of 3 people found the following review useful:
Light up your life, 27 September 2007
Author:
Gary170459 from Derby, UK
A very stylish outing from Jean Renoir spun from a simple children's
fable from Andersen into something even simpler but memorably bleak as
well.
The little match girl of the title is not so little here in the
beautiful Catherine Hessling giving a mesmerising performance for
Renoir, who filmed her lovingly in soft or blurred focus throughout.
The story moves logically from trying to sell matches to live to trying
to light them to live, in between with a child-like pressed nose to a
café then a toy shop's window to living the dream while freezing to
death in the snow. When your time's up even sheltering from the falling
snow under a single plank can be taken away from you. There's some
great low-key fancy camera and set trickery in the toy shop dream
sequence such as Karen dancing in slo-mo through nets, and lovely smoky
visuals especially the life and death chase through the sky. It can
sometimes remind you of a silent pop video - the crew must had have fun
piecing it all together!
Although it doesn't say as much for human determination as Passion of
Joan of Arc from the same year (what could!), I've always found
anything by Renoir to be highly enjoyable, educational and a salutary
lesson in how to make art not Art movies.
4 out of 6 people found the following review useful:
Dance macabre...., 3 April 2006
Author:
dbdumonteil
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
Hans Christian Andersen's "little match girl" is a tale so famous in
the whole world it would be an insult to the users'culture to summarize
the story.What is obvious in Renoir's adaptation is the disappearance
of the Christian spirit (no pun intended).Its conclusion was not that
much pessimistic:the heroine and her grandma meet up in Heaven ,a place
where hunger and the cold are unknown.
There is not a single hint at "pie in the sky" in Renoir's
screenplay.Casting Catherine Hess -his favorite actress of the silent
era ("Nana") as well as his father Auguste's model- forced the director
to make his heroine older.The first part,in the streets where rich
people enjoy a life a luxury in restaurants where they Despise the Poor
,displays Charlie Chaplin's influence.These shots of Hessling behind
the pane are essentially Chaplinesque.
But the second part is fantasy and horror :the heroine's hallucinations
,which were full of tenderness and compassion in the short story , are
dreamlike,maleficent and even ominous."Alice in wonderland" meets death
instead of the Queen of Hearts.The toys might signify a return to the
kingdom of childhood but they could also indicate that man is a puppet
into the hands of a superior strength he does not really understand.
The Danse Macabre -which is actually a Macabre ride ,with the heroine
perhaps knocking on Heaven's door- predates Ingmar Bergman's "the
seventh seal " by thirty years.It's all there including the grave where
the match girl will return to ashes and dust .On the street ,people
find the dead body.
"Are people naive enough to think they can warm up with some measly
matches?" they say.
That night,the gates of Heaven were closed.
A short that shows that Jean Renoir was one of the greatest geniuses of
the French cinema.
4 out of 6 people found the following review useful:
Bleak adaption of famous story, 2 January 2006
Author:
Gblakelii from United States
Although this version hits on many of the points in the original story, there is no doubt that this is director Jean Renoir's very own interpretation. He perhaps outdoes Hans Christian Andersen in conveying a harsh reality with little or no recompense. The finale is heavy laden with symbolism of which might have been some influence to Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane". Renoir himself seems to have been influenced by Andersen's "Steadfast Tin Soldier" and Victor Herbert's "Babes in Toyland(1903)". And the life size dolls remind one of Maria in "Metropolis(German, 1927)". The New Year's story should be familiar to most- one sorrowful day in the life of a poor girl, without happiness at home nor on the job. This particular adaption presents a girl much older than seen elsewhere and is set in the present. Ranks a close third behind the 1937 cartoon and the near perfect 1986 British musical film. With sound effects and music, the latter used particularly well with a rendition of Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries", which of course(to Western fans)was also used with great results in My Name Is Nobody(Italian, 1974). The video edition viewed had fair to good picture quality.
Quite beautiful., 30 April 2012
Author:
planktonrules from Bradenton, Florida
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
This film was written and directed by Jean Renoir. It's based on the
story by Hans Christian Andersen ("Den Lille Pige med Svovlstikkerne").
The film is a visual treat of the silent era--and looks more like an
art film than I expected. Some of this probably is due to Renoir's
heritage (his father was the famous painter, Pierre-Auguste Renoir). In
several ways it differs from the Andersen story (the physical abuse is
played way down and the child's dead grandmother is not in this film
and the girl is much older in the movie), but is otherwise pretty much
the same.
The film begins in a northern city during the winter. A pretty young
lady is forced to go into the snowy night to sell matches. She is very
hungry and very cold--and no one seems to take much notice of her.
Eventually, driven by her depleted condition, she sits down in the snow
and begins to hallucinate about a better life. By the end of the film,
she is found dead in the snow.
While this is a super-depressing story, it makes for good social
commentary. It also gave Renoir lots of opportunity to use his artistic
skills, as the hallucination sequence makes up nearly half the film and
is quite surreal. While some of the techniques he used in the film seem
a bit quaint and dated today, as a silent, it is a gorgeous
thing--lovingly filmed and well worth your time. One of the great
director's best films. Fortunately, you can download it for free at
archive.org.
Shedding second skin, 23 September 2011
Author:
chaos-rampant from Greece
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.
Early Renoir, 15 February 2010
Author:
JoeytheBrit from www.moviemoviesite.com
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.
I think the name is misleading, but still a lovely picture!, 30 July 2009
Author:
B L from United States
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
Well if I may add my two cents I agree this is not what the little Match girl was suppose to be. It gives me a feel of a babes in toy land and the nut cracker personally. It is still very pretty and I enjoyed the animation.The toy solders moving around in the stop go animation was done wonderfully! I thought the actresses were down right lovely and performed well. I really loved the actresses dress as dolls dancing. Just lovely, what else can I say. It is a lovely film. As a version of the match girl the film fails. However it is still a lovely peace despite the name issue. If you can look past that,its an enjoyable film. There's my two cents for you!
A fantastic piece of imaginative work, 5 April 2008
Author:
limshun from Brooklyn, NY
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.
Visually striking, moving and poetic, 22 September 2007
Author:
OldAle1 from United States
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
I have to disagree somewhat with the general assessment of Catherine
Hessling's portrayal here; sure, she is no small girl but she does I
think a good job of portraying the innocence, naïveté and poverty
necessary to the role. If anything, this is my favorite of her early
performances, perhaps excepting "Whirlpool of Fate"; I guess I buy her
in the waifish role.
At any rate, this is first-rate as a visual fantasy, starting from the
opening model-shots of the city walls and train, obviously fake but
pretty good for the era. The early scenes of the match-girl wandering,
looking in at the wealthy diners in a restaurant, are as mentioned
reminiscent of Chaplin -- and for that matter of a great many silent
melodramas; the later fantasy sequence as she hallucinates in the snow
is more avant-garde and might remind one of both German and Russian
models (probably because the French experimental films of the silent
era are lesser-known today); using Mussorgsky and Wagner for the
musical choices (along with a bit of Mozart's Turkish March, I think)
helps cement the association.
The finish is shockingly bleak and cold, reminding us that for all of
his good humor and joie de vivre, Renoir like Twain never forgot the
worst in humanity.
1 out of 2 people found the following review useful:
Striking visuals undermined by a miscast lead, 17 July 2007
Author:
TrevorAclea from London, England
La Petite Marchande D'Allumettes aka The Little Match Girl also suffers from an unconvincing and badly cast lead performance from Mrs Renoir, Catherine Hessling, who looks anything but little and more than capable of looking after herself, which certainly takes the edge off Hans Christian Andersen's tale. Indeed, the film makes a couple of attempts to write itself out of the problem by portraying her as more than usually stupid, but they feel more like in-jokes than anything else. It's a shame, because the film itself is an impressively staged fantasy with great special effects and some interesting visual experimentation with camera speed and focus amid the unashamedly romantic treatment of the fantasy scenes, especially the sequence where the girl and her toy soldier are chased through the clouds by Death in the form of a relentless Hussar. If only you could care about the character. Lions Gate's transfer is rather more worn than their other Renoir titles, being mastered from a 1959 reissue with a good synchronised soundtrack.
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