The Match Factory Girl (1992)

Truly Dreadful Film

Highly Overrated But Still Good

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

While watching this movie, I want to say that I couldn't stop thinking - wow ! Camera work, music, actors, story line, everything is great. Colors in movie all the time are dark and pale, but at the same time it gives a depressing mood, what plays a big role as music always is quite energetic and even happy. While watching that movie, till the end you have a feeling that the main character thinks about suicide and wants to die, but actually after a lot of thoughts she comes up with the idea that the reason of her unhappiness are the people who surround her all the time. If mother loved her as a daughter, if her mom's husband was working and took care of house, she wouldn't had to spend all money for their needs, but could buy things that would make her happy as a woman. If that man wouldn't act with her like a prostitute but said at the beginning that he didn't want relationship with that girl she wouldn't fell in love with him and so on, so she decides to poison everybody, anyway she know that her life doesn't have any meaning, so she doesn't loose anything (we can see that fact even when she poisons man in the bar who just sat near her).I want to say that movie is strong, there was no actual action but everything is directed so well that you can't stop watching, and you start to feel sorry for main character, and even start understanding her, as it happens to you. I would say that this movie is now one of my favorite ones in minimalist movies.

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.

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.

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.