The Match Factory Girl (1990) User Reviews

no love, no future, a desire for revenge

[dbdumonteil · 8/10 · 5 May 2005]

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.

Life will never seem as bad again

[trilobee · 9/10 · 22 September 2000]

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.

Not a good ad for the Finnish tourism bureau

[Tomlonso · 8/10 · 15 July 2004]

But a masterful minimalist portrait of a woman taking one of the few options open to her. "Iiris" is a Dickensian heroine: beset with a brute of a step father, loving a wealthy cad who turns cold when she expects warmth, and reaching out to a distant brother who loves her but cannot provide the family she seeks. Overall her world is so bleak, cold and mean that the universal comment I heard after the movie screened was "Thank God I'm not Finnish!". This is a 20th century telling of the tale of the Little Match Girl so the end fits modern sensabilities.

The humor of this comedy is easy to miss as you watch it play out, but on retrospect it comes through loud and strong.

My personal highlight of the movie was the use of song and music to propel the action. Not having a clue about Finnish pop music, I'm sure I'm missing some elements, but the subtle themes come across quite well.

A simple, unhurried, beautiful, minimalist modern fable

[chaos-rampant · 5 December 2008]

With THE MATCH FACTORY GIRL Kaurismaki might not tread new ground but instead perfects the stylistic hallmarks that marked him apart from most other directors of his generation. His work is that of a sculptor, hacking away at all the cinematic fat, shaping form by removing that which is not necessary. His movies as an extension of his sculptory approach attain an almost hypnotic quality - or perhaps boring uneventfulness for others. He's not at all trying to hit emotionally draining highs and lows but build a rhythmic lull, a soothing pace created of flows and ebbs that move with imperceptible change. As a result, his movies never hurry to get anywhere fast and when they get there not a whole lot happens. It's all about appreciating how they got there and the stylistic subtleties of that journey.

THE MATCH FACTORY GIRL finds Kaurismaki shunning dialogue even more than previous efforts, if that's even possible without making a modern silent picture. Which it pretty much is. The entirety of the dialogue doesn't amount to more than 1 minute and that too is used more as a form of punctuation to the images - he could easily have done the movie completely without dialogues if he so wanted. The story could have been summed up in a 20 minute short yet Kaurismaki stretches it to 65 minutes, a meagre duration by most people's standards, which here feels like a good 90 minutes.

Although the material is perhaps the most bleak and brooding he had done at that point in his career since his debut CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, it is spiced up by moments of his trademark glacial humour. A certain scene in bar involving a drunk, sleazy patron and rat poison had me laughing out loud, which is a minor success for a film of this kind. The most dramatic scenes are delivered with that same kind of deadpan unaffection that immediately acquires a serio-comic air for that reason.

Although it lacks the playfulness of its predecessor (ARIEL), this is still Kaurismaki in top visual form. He has a way with images and how he orchestrates them that is quite unparalleled at his level. Sure he's not a director of epic works and spectacle but he's carved a niche for himself over the years that has his name and particular sensibilities written all over it and he's been content to work within it. If you like his style, this is a safebet. If you're a newcomer I'd suggest starting with something like ARIEL.

A brilliant deadpan tragedy

[Lexo-2 · 10/10 · 26 April 1999]

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.

this may be Kaurismaki's masterpiece; a tragicomedy both breathtaking and bleak

[framptonhollis · 10/10 · 20 April 2017]

Throughout my exploration of brilliant Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki's "Proletariat Trilogy" I have noticed the repetition of several themes and stylistic choices, which include:

Dry, deadpan humor.

An often melancholic atmosphere.

Cinematography that is both colorful and grounded in reality

Realistic characters (meaning: characters that are highly flawed, often awkward-the type of people one ignores while taking a daily stroll, played by actors who are not glamorous or ugly).

Getting the audience to root for behaviors they otherwise would not be rooting for.

"The Match Factory Girl", an excellent film that may very well be his masterpiece, embodies all of these little traits, especially the final one. I refuse to spoil the surprises this film keeps in store for its viewers, but I will imply that the heroine definitely engages in some acts that would be villainous in almost any other movie. However, through the lens of Aki Kaurismäki anyone can be likable, and anything can be hilarious.

Although it is less predominant that in most of his other works, Aki Kaurismäki's sly sense of dry comedy lurks throughout this tragic drama. There were several instances in which I genuinely (and unexpectedly) burst with juvenile laughter at scenes that would often be considered too sad to be funny. I have compared certain Aki Kaurismäki films to the works of Wes Anderson, but now I must also compare him to the likes of Ingmar Bergman and Todd Solondz.

There is no denying that this film is both dark and comic, it is a sad, yet surprisingly entertaining little look at an unfortunate life.

A simple story that kept me watching

[bandw · 7/10 · 13 March 2014]

This is a downbeat story of a young woman, Iris, who works on an assembly line in a match stick factory in Finland. Iris' life would give testament to the truth of Thoreau's quote, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." She comes home from her tedious job to a dismal apartment that she shares with her mother and stepfather--both major losers. They take what little money Iris earns and berate her if she spends on herself.

While Iris is not unattractive, she presents such a sullen and drab appearance that she is ignored at community dances, until she buys a new red dress when she finally attracts the attention of a man. But don't plan on a happy ending to that one. Years of suppressed resentment can provoke dramatic acts of revenge.

At a little over an hour this movie could have played as an episode on "Alfred Hitchcock Presents." Except it has better production values and acting that most shows on that program. I thought the humorous twist in the final scene was particularly in the style of Hitchcock.

I enjoyed the establishing shots in the match factory. I have never given much thought about the process of creating match sticks and found the presentation of that interesting. So much complexity and machinery involved in producing such a simple product.

Wanna know about Finnish culture? Watch this film...

[AslaugRuotsalainen · 10/10 · 16 June 2003]

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...

Scandinavian austerity makes words unnecessary

[karmaswimswami · 7/10 · 22 January 2015]

Matches here are a metaphor for undistinguished short lives, and work well to propel Aki Kaurismaki's sere, reductionist story. He clearly works well with lead actress Kati Outinen, and the predictability of the tale is deliberate so as to force the viewer to confront the unsaturated colors, the paint that needs re-doing, the absence of empathy, the rarity of anything in the lead character's life to cling to or believe in. While themes, aesthetics and behaviors on display here are characteristically Nordic, Kaurismaki's manner, set-ups, and potent understatement are his alone and in top-shelf form. One wants a larger oeuvre from him.

A profoundly sad black comedy

[MaxBorg89 · 10/10 · 27 September 2006]

Most critics say one of Aki Kaurismäki's trademarks is the way he ends his movies: the epilogue is generally happy, but with an underlying sad feel to it. The Match Factory Girl shows an exemplary use of that technique.

This heartbreaking tragedy features Kaurismäki's muse, Kati Outinen, in a career-best performance: she plays Iris, a poor, lonely woman with no real life. She has a boring job in a match factory (the opening sequence of the film, showing how things go on there, is reminiscent of the director's debut, Crime and Punishment), lives with her detached mother (Elina Salo) and cruel stepfather (a revelatory turn from Esko Nikkari), and has no friends at all.

One night she decides to go out and "have fun". Things go bad right from the start: when she picks a dress to wear, her step-dad slaps her in the face, coldly insulting her. She gets picked up by a guy in a bar, only he thinks she's a prostitute (there we go again) and dumps her the following morning, completely ignoring her subsequent pleas for help when she finds out she's pregnant. At this point, enough is enough: Iris decides it's payback time for all the bad things that have ever happened to her.

What happens next, I can't reveal. I can only say it's in the last part of the film that we get to understand what "sad happy ending" means. the conclusion is positive in a way (a very ironic, cruel, painful one), but we find ourselves overwhelmed by the tragic undertones. Even though we cheer for Outinen's character, we realize things can't possibly go well from now on. That's why the last chapter of the "workers" trilogy is the most gripping: underneath its ironic facade lies a carefully crafted study of human existence at its most extreme. They don't make many films like this anymore...

Kaurismäki's sparsest and most political film

[crculver · 6/10 · 3 August 2015]

Aki Kaurismaki's 1990 film TULITIKKUTEHTAAN TYTTÖ (The Match Factory Girl) caps a series of three late-1980s films (which Criterion called the "Proletarian Trilogy") where the Finnish auteur explored the tribulations of lower-class lonely hearts.

The protagonist of TULITIKKUTEHTAAN TYTTÖ is Iris (Kati Outinen), a taciturn 20-something who still lives with, and financially supports, her layabout parents (Elina Salo, Esko Nikkari). Iris has no real social life to speak of, being ignored by co-workers and, at her nightly excursions to dance halls, by men. After meeting wealthy businessman Aarne (Vesa Vierikko), she thinks she has found happiness, but is cruelly abandoned by him and then her parents. Though she doesn't visibly snap, the pressures take their toll, and she ultimately gets her revenge on those who have done her wrong...

As the film progresses, radio and television in the background report the news of Chinese government forces suppressing the protest in Tiananmen Square. That overt political focus is something rather unusual for Kaurismäki. He has usually included some criticism of state bureaucracy in his films, but here the film is entirely a metaphor for what might happen if the people are held down too hard and too long. Kati Outinen has one of the quirkiest faces in cinema, but here makeup and lighting accentuate those looks and she becomes the very image of misery.

TULITIKKUTEHTAAN TYTTÖ fits with Kaurismäki's general aesthetic in that the film features décor and music from the 1950s, although it is ostensibly set in the present day. His penchant for minimal dialogue here is taken even further than usual. What sets this film apart from the rest of his output, however, is that it lacks his characteristic deadpan humour. Even when he focuses on the underdogs staying under, there's usually some chuckles in his work. Consequently, I found TULITIKKUTEHTAAN TYTTÖ often unpleasantly bleak, less enjoyable than his other films. Nonetheless, the streamlined script and careful cinematography make this a film worth seeing at least once.

The gift that keeps not giving

[masleniki · 6/10 · 22 December 2023]

The movie presents a good background story for the dull, bleak life of a woman. And that's it. I kept waiting for the plot to unfold, but it kept being monotonous and uneventful. Atmosphere is perfectly depicted and conveys the message of a lack of meaning and means of exiting the depressing reality. But it does it for the sake of doing that and only that. Storywise the film has almost no value to me. It's like a beautiful landscape painting. The worst part is that although having the most boring storyline ever, it leaves nothing to the imagination. The characters don't speak, not because you have to figure out their feelings and intentions, but because there is really nothing to tell. Acting is on par with that. Everyone has the same facial expression throughout the movie, no matter what is happening. If there is a funny, joyful or sad moment, you will see the stillness of their faces persists at all costs.

HOW?

[RRamov · 4/10 · 4 January 2019]

Can anybody explain how this can be labeled as a COMEDY????

An interesting film from Kaurismäki, but not one that I would rate as a masterpiece

[ThreeSadTigers · 18 April 2008]

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.

Horrible tragedy with great comic timing.

[seltzer · 10/10 · 13 March 2002]

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.

Excellent bleak Finnish humor

[filmtvandlife · 10/10 · 21 February 2014]

I found this film to be delightfully minimalistic, Iris' innocence is completely shattered by the harsh reality of life as she grows into a woman.

I thoroughly enjoyed this film and it has definitely become one of my favorites, the exploration of a working class girl who is expected to provide for her parents and receive nothing in return is expertly done. The minimal dialog and focus on the dreariness of Iris' working class life is a very effective narrative.

Iris is a simple working class woman who has simple working class desires, she searches for a partner in life and love only to be at first rejected, the chewed up and spat out by a cold unfeeling upper class middle aged balding man.

When life gives us lemons most of us hope that there is something better out there, we try to improve ourselves even through the harshness and selfishness of our fellow human beings we see a light. Why do we do this? Iris refuses to answer this question, or even contemplate it.

I recommend this film without hesitation, Enjoy!

more reviews @ filmstvandlife.wordpress.com

Unremarkable Sad Tale - Not a Comedy

[Erik-Movie-Reviews · 7/10 · 25 February 2021]

It is a sad tale of a mistreated young women who decides she has had enough. Not much in the way of dialogue or plot, more of a predictable knee jerk reaction to being wronged. Definitely not funny and does not put Finland or Finns in a good light.

Hard to tell if the actors and actresses are acting, or if life in Finland is as unpleasant as it appears in the film. Would explain the high suicide rate though....

Iiris's private Danse Macabre

[hasosch · 10/10 · 14 May 2009]

Iiris is not considered a beautiful girl (although I personally would protest against such a judgment), so whenever she goes to dance, she is the only one left alone by the dancers. She has to pay for her drink at the bar. At home, there is her mother and the mother's boyfriend, sitting around the whole day in cross-training-clothes (a very strange parallel between Finnish and Hungarian people), smoking, drinking vodka, watching television or what is going on outside the window. (Quite a situation which we see so often in Béla Tarr's early movies.) Iiris works in a match factory and supports both her mother and the mother's boyfriend with the money she makes. Moreover, in the evening, she washes and irons the clothes. When one day she buys her a new sexy dress, the mother's man calls her a whore and tells her to bring the cloth back so that he has more to live from it during this month. Already at this point, the most patient watcher would whack out, but Iiris carries her grief with herself alone. However, one evening, she meets a man in her bar, they dance, they drink, they go to his expensive looking apartment. When she awakes in the morning, she finds a money bill on her nightstand. When she knocks at his door a few days later, he refuses to let her in. When she finds out that she got pregnant, a few weeks later, she gets a one-sentence notice by typewriter from him saying: "Get rid of it" - together with a check destined to an abortionist.

But thanks to the non-existing god in this world of the Helsinki suburbs, Iiris is not Brecht's "Heilige Johanna Der Schlachthöfe". She enters a pharmacy and buys a good-sized package of rat poison. She chooses a nice little bottle, where she fills the lethal mixture of dissolved rat poison and goes first to the bar. Like an inverted female Jesus Christ at the Last Supper, she pours with an angel-like face a good slug of poison in the innocent-looking man's whiskey glass. And so, she goes on, from station to station, not like Federspiel's "Tiffoid Mary" an essentially unknowing killer-medium, but wholly determined Kaurismäki's "Rat Posion Iiris", a sweet-looking female death on her Danse Macabre.

Blackest humor imaginable

[timmy_501 · 8/10 · 16 May 2010]

Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki is famous for his dour, minimalist black comedies. 1990's Match Factory Girl is bleak even by his standards though. Titular character Iris is an utterly miserable woman with no human connections. Although she works in a large factory there are no other workers stationed anywhere near her and her attempt to make conversation with another employee in a common area causes her peer to walk away without saying a word.

Things are even less happy at home. Iris lives with her mother and stepfather but they make her pay rent and prepare meals for them. Rather than talk to one another they watch television which tends to be on news programs that cover topics such as the Tianamen Square Massacre.

To get away from her unpleasant home environment Iris goes to an old fashioned dance hall where every girl quickly finds a dance partner - every girl except Iris, that is, who sits alone on a bench for what would appear to be hours. On another occasion she splurges on a new dress, prompting her stepfather to utter his only word of dialogue in the entire film: "Whore." Apparently he isn't the only one who feels that way about her as the man she finally finds at the dance hall leaves some money on her dresser the next morning.

Things actually get more bleak from there. In one hilariously sad scene Iris is shown crying hysterically while watching a Marx Brothers film. Eventually she tires of her wretched existence and decides to take revenge on those who have wronged her. She murders several people in the same detached way she works at her match factory or prepares dinner, though: even this brings her no satisfaction.

Kaurismaki's sees the world as a hopeless place and he makes films so we can see it that way too. Even with the deadpan humor, The Match Factory Girl is a bitter pill to swallow.

A small gem

[MOscarbradley · 9/10 · 11 May 2015]

To say that nobody makes movies like so-and-so tells us nothing about the kind of film we are watching yet one has only to say the name Aki Kaurismaki and you know that no-one else makes movies quite like him and you know exactly what you are going to get. Kaurismaki's movies are mostly short, funny in a black, very sad sort of way and to say they are minimalist is ... well, something of an understatement to say the least. He is one of the great directors, though the very simplicity of his work might make people think otherwise.

"The Match Factory Girl" is one of his very best films. Dialogue is kept to a minimum, (before any of the characters actually speak we hear a news report and a song). Indeed, there are times when you feel this could just as easily have worked as a silent film as Kaurismaki clearly knows that you don't need words to convey what is happening or to explain the emotions that are on display.

The Match Factory girl of the title is Iris, (a superb Kati Outinen), who dreams of escaping her dead-end job in the local match factory and ends up pregnant after a one-night stand. This unplanned for event is the catalyst that prompts her to take some kind of action that will radically alter her situation in a way you are not likely to expect.

There isn't really much to it. It clocks in at an economical 66 minutes and it is like the perfect short story. Perhaps we wouldn't want to, or don't really need to, spend any more time with Iris than we have to, (she's not an attractive character in any way). It only takes the short running time of this picture to tell us all we need to know about her and as the film progresses our initial apathy turns into a kind of grudging admiration. Small, yes; minimal, most definitely and really rather wonderful.

Piece of crap

[igotdaballs2doit · 2/10 · 20 June 2009]

Good for me that I watched this film at home, so that I didn't bore myself to death with it, but could play solitaire (yes, it drove me to that). I didn't like the film because: -Finnish people are not as extremely quiet as depicted in this film, so don't get the wrong idea about this nice European nation. Was it trying to be artistic??? It was just plain boring. -Iris has a behaviour that I couldn't imagine any human being could have... She's a loser who accepts her faith, but suddenly she's had enough and kills others, instead of killing herself, which would have been the more credible ending. -During the whole one hour of the film I had permanently the feeling that nothing fits... nada, nix... like watching separate scenes from different movies put together. E nough said. My advice is: DO NOT waste an hour of your life with this film. IMDb rating does not reflect reality.

Incredibly depressing - and highly enjoyable

[mark-506 · 19 September 1999]

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.

a life in gray hues and endless matches

[Quinoa1984 · 9/10 · 26 April 2016]

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.

Tradegy

[finn_ · 10/10 · 10 March 2007]

This is my favorite Kaurismaki film--tragedy with black humor.

Dialog, as usual, is plain and there is very little of it.

The film is beautifully shot. Camera stays static, giving space for colors and lighting.

Kati Outinen's performance is amazing. Her eyes are somehow able to express the deepest sadness and longing. Her suffering feels real, one feels this urge to step into the film to just say a kind word to her, to try to make her feel better.

Kaurismaki plays here with his audience's mind. He said in an interview that the amount of rat poison Iris gives to the ones who have done wrong to her is actually not enough to kill anybody--meaning that is us who send Iris to prison for committing this horrible series of murders.

One shouldn't let the film's simple face fool oneself--it is much more than a story of wrongdoing and revenge.

Soundtrack fits perfectly to the atmosphere and it has an important role in telling the story, as well as explaining Iris's emotions and motives throughout the film.