Match Factory Girl

Aki Kaurismaki's ash-can school Match Factory Girl (1989) seems grim to the point of being unwatchable when objectively described -- its plot is an exploration of the lower depths on par with Bresson's Mouchette, a film that the movie slightly resembles.  But Kaurismaki makes films with grave elegance suffused with a weird sort of dead pan humor -- things are so miserable in Match Factory Girl that they are funny.  The film's title invokes another exercise in the Les Miserables' genre, Hans Christian Andersen's brutal fable "The Little Match Girl"  -- if I recall correctly, the protagonist of Andersen's depressing tale freezes to death; Kaurismaki's heroine, if she can be so named, is mistreated by everyone to the point that she takes revenge, essentially killing off all the other characters in the film.  In the film's last shot, she is dutifully checking labels on match boxes, a task that seems her main occupation in a horrendously grungy, loud, and dehumanizing factory, standing at her work-station oblivious to a couple of morose-looking cops come to haul her away.  The police drag her out of the scene; the image doesn't care -- the factory just keeps running mindlessly until the shot fades to black.  This ending correlates to the movie's opening five minutes, a sequence that amounts to an beautifully composed and informative documentary on the industrial production of matches -- the factory's various levers and conveyor belts seem to work perfectly fine without the intervention of human hands.  The match factory girl is played by Kati Outinen, one of Kaurismaki's signature actresses -- she is emaciated and, with her albino-white features and severe underbite (and lips licked raw red), resembles a crazed rabbit.  The girl lives with her mother (and stepfather) in a shabby apartment for which she pays most of her wages from the factory as rent.  (When she buys a red dress for her nocturnal excursions to a dance hall down the street, her stepfather slaps her face and calls her a whore -- angry, it seems, because she has diverted some of the rent away from him into this frivolous purchase.)  Told to return to the dress, the match factory girl instead dons it, gets picked-up by Aarne, a heartless fellow who speaks about ten words in the whole film, and ends up pregnant.  Aarne tells her curtly to "get rid of the brat".  This enrages the heroine, although one can't detect that from her featureless expression or speech (she's pretty much silent in any event) and she uses rat poison to kill everyone in sight.   This sounds unpalatable, but, in fact, its amusing, partly because the director doesn't sentimentalize his murderous heroine -- she's just as awful as everyone else in Helsinki.  Kaurismaki is a great classical filmmaker in complete control of every aspect of his movies.  His camera work is impeccable and his editing precise and, even, scientific.  In one scene, eye-lines don't match and the viewer feels a palpable jolt -- but this is a key moment in the movie and Kaurismaki's actors, who generally are totally flat in their affect, don't express the emotion:  the cut and the mismatched eye-lines does this work subliminally.  The sound track is full of remarkable noises --nightmare blues so raw that they seem to be bleeding, crooning accompanied by accordion, sub-hillbilly rock-and-roll:  all of this lensed with Kaurismaki's impeccable elegance and clarity, punctuated with brilliantly framed still-lifes -- for instance, a jukebox and a pool table incongruously crammed together into the tiny apartment where the match factory girl's brother lives.  Every gesture is meaningful:  Aarne's sudden motion to grip the girl's wrist is echoed by a hapless drunk who does the same thing to the heroine in a down-and-out bar.  Since no one touches anyone in this movie, this kind of gesture stands out as remarkable, memorable, even bizarre -- and rhymes with a scene in which the heroine's miserable mother, also tentatively touches the girl's wrist.  This movie is a primer on how to make a film -- no one speaks for the first 14 minutes in the picture and the whole thing is only 69 minutes long.