The Match Factory Girl

If the point of this film was to make me want to give Kati Outinen a big old hug and a hundred dollar bill, than it totally fucking succeeded.

Iris is a plain, stoic girl who works a drudge-y job in a match factory and tends to get treated rather poorly. Kaurismaki follows her around, and at first it seems a bit pointless, but the story very slowly becomes more and more interesting. There's some similarities to Ming-liang Tsai here, perhaps a "Tsai Lite". Long takes, mostly stationary camera, characters "doing nothing", and extremely dry humor.

True to the spirit of the Finnish modus operandi, there's very little dialogue. The characters don't care enough about each other to bother to have normal conversations. Because of this, sound effects such as a person opening a letter or lighting a cigarette seem (or perhaps they actually are) twice as loud as usual. Couple this with the long takes and few camera moves, and the sound becomes perhaps the single most defining aspect of the film.

Iris is plain, downtrodden, and stepped over by just about everybody in her life, even those who don't know her. Her situation becomes more and more dire, and just when you figure it's gonna be a piece of utterly miserablist fare...holy shit does it go in a totally unexpected direction. Kaurismaki's patience and visual storytelling, rather than inducing tedium, give this a hell of an undercurrent of tension.

I wanted to like this, and I sort of did by the end, but the film is just so drab and doesn't fully commit to the pacing nor the characterizations. I think this might be a larger problem I have with Kaurismäki, where I'm sympathetic to the emotional core of his characters, but not the way he portrays them and their actions. The ending was interesting, but it didn't feel earned, the directorial hand is too omnipresent.