The opening of The Match Factory Girl, the first few minutes, doesn't feature the actress Kati Outinen, who is the Girl of the title Iris - instead Kaurismäki shows us how matches are made. This sounds like it could be deathly dull, but the way it's shot and edited you see the process of it, and it's all completely impersonal. No matter what the machine keeps rolling along, stripping the wood from trees into tiny little pieces of wood that people use to make fire. I think it's important that we don't see Iris at first, and when we do first see her face it's the second shot following her hands. She could be anybody, another faceless person working at the machine that keeps on making these matches, the monotony of it, how it's so impersonal that actually having things like dreams or happiness wouldn't do much at all.
This is an example of such a low-key "slice of life" narrative that is all about the banality of life and then, as it turns out, the sort of banality of evil (though there's initially a good reason for this person becoming). What leads someone, who has a pretty safe if not very equitable day job, to poison a bunch of people? Iris doesn't really have much or many prospects, and she lives in a world that is full of grays. This isn't to say the palette of the camera is gray (this isn't like Children of Men or something), but all of the objects, the buildings, the rooms, the clothes, it's a nation made out of dreary, hopeless things. So when Iris does something like, say, buy a dress to make herself slightly more attractive, her father slaps her for her gall (and for not, you know, immediately giving any extra money she has to the family).
But I wonder if that added color is almost a disrupter of its own, to the aesthetic that people are comfortable with. This is a film that is quite brief - barely 68 minutes - and yet it tells a complete narrative, slim as it is, by showing us this simple chain of events: girl meets boy, boy tells girl to go away, girl is knocked up, girl asks for help, boy rejects girl, girl gets her vengeance. But this is not some exciting movie or even some piece of exploitation trash like I Spit on Your Grave (thank goodness). This is more in debt to Bresson - and later I'm pretty much certain was what Soderbergh watched before making Bubble, which I don't like anywhere near as much as this - where it's all about how people have this lack of humanity, it's repressed, it's all tucked down deep, and yet the filmmaker is deeply human and caring about the people in his line of sight.
Outinen's performance is fascinating for how she does a lot with so little. Just her sitting in bed, her eyes say a lot about her present mental state, or when she cries during a movie (what movie is it, why is it making her cry, who knows, it's a movie and an escape/release for her emotions), and of course how she can show hurt without being really BIG with her emotional register. In other words this suffuses what could be a basic melodrama by making it about how she is raised in this world of the dreary and gray, but the rest of the outside world - seemingly another galaxy - has a lot worse problems (i.e. Tieneman square is brought up in a broadcast on the news, not necessarily dating it as you could put any disaster in its place) - and music is often shown her as modern or hard or rough (the original version of "Brand New Cadillac" comes at a crucial point on a jukebox).
It's certainly not a movie for everyone; it moves slowly, and the director and editor cut it in such a way that shots linger longer than you may be used to. But stick with it and you'll find that it's a rather troubling and startling movie about what it means to be a part of the "working class", and a woman, without many real rights or prospects. Not exactly a happy movie, and the way it ends with its multiple murders is startling (I wondered where it came from, but honestly it's besides the point), and it's essential in a way of understanding the malaise and repetition of many people in the modern world.
This is an example of such a low-key "slice of life" narrative that is all about the banality of life and then, as it turns out, the sort of banality of evil (though there's initially a good reason for this person becoming). What leads someone, who has a pretty safe if not very equitable day job, to poison a bunch of people? Iris doesn't really have much or many prospects, and she lives in a world that is full of grays. This isn't to say the palette of the camera is gray (this isn't like Children of Men or something), but all of the objects, the buildings, the rooms, the clothes, it's a nation made out of dreary, hopeless things. So when Iris does something like, say, buy a dress to make herself slightly more attractive, her father slaps her for her gall (and for not, you know, immediately giving any extra money she has to the family).
But I wonder if that added color is almost a disrupter of its own, to the aesthetic that people are comfortable with. This is a film that is quite brief - barely 68 minutes - and yet it tells a complete narrative, slim as it is, by showing us this simple chain of events: girl meets boy, boy tells girl to go away, girl is knocked up, girl asks for help, boy rejects girl, girl gets her vengeance. But this is not some exciting movie or even some piece of exploitation trash like I Spit on Your Grave (thank goodness). This is more in debt to Bresson - and later I'm pretty much certain was what Soderbergh watched before making Bubble, which I don't like anywhere near as much as this - where it's all about how people have this lack of humanity, it's repressed, it's all tucked down deep, and yet the filmmaker is deeply human and caring about the people in his line of sight.
Outinen's performance is fascinating for how she does a lot with so little. Just her sitting in bed, her eyes say a lot about her present mental state, or when she cries during a movie (what movie is it, why is it making her cry, who knows, it's a movie and an escape/release for her emotions), and of course how she can show hurt without being really BIG with her emotional register. In other words this suffuses what could be a basic melodrama by making it about how she is raised in this world of the dreary and gray, but the rest of the outside world - seemingly another galaxy - has a lot worse problems (i.e. Tieneman square is brought up in a broadcast on the news, not necessarily dating it as you could put any disaster in its place) - and music is often shown her as modern or hard or rough (the original version of "Brand New Cadillac" comes at a crucial point on a jukebox).
It's certainly not a movie for everyone; it moves slowly, and the director and editor cut it in such a way that shots linger longer than you may be used to. But stick with it and you'll find that it's a rather troubling and startling movie about what it means to be a part of the "working class", and a woman, without many real rights or prospects. Not exactly a happy movie, and the way it ends with its multiple murders is startling (I wondered where it came from, but honestly it's besides the point), and it's essential in a way of understanding the malaise and repetition of many people in the modern world.