The Match Factory Girl

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.

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.

A great little film. My first Kaurismaki, I think there will be more.

Perhaps the purest distillation of Kaurismäki's cinematic style, combining romantic melodrama and kitchen sink realism in an expression that goes beyond deadpan. Confronting tonal complexity within a frame of liberating poetic simplicity.

Was this kinda funny or am I just an asshole?

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.

A unique and compelling film about drudgery, failure, working class struggle, and depression. Kaurismaki's style brings to mind a slightly more colourful Bresson, reducing everything to its bare essence and coming across some rare magic. It also takes a very unexpected turn near the end which is not only interesting but makes you reconsider all you've seen, and Outinen does a lot with very little as our heroine.

Of the Kaurismäki films I have seen, this one is, shall we say, the purest example of his style, and several people have found this extremely black and dry comedy an upsetting experience: bleakness and grimness of it all is so excessive and shown in a way that one has to laugh at it, and then feel guilty for laughing at the symphathetic sufferer Kati Outinen...

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.

The style is amazing, but I did find that where it goes cheapens the character portrait somewhat.

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.

Filmin sadece adını ve proletarya üçlemesini bir parçası olduğunu bilerek izlemeye başlayınca daha bir "işçi filmi" bekliyordum açıkçası. Fakat, Kaurismaki ana karakterin ruh haline o kadar hakim ve izleyeni anlatısının içine öyle bir çekiyor ki... Son olarak da, güçlü bir kadın portesi olduğunu belirteyim, ki aslında bu konuda daha bir sürü şey yazılabilir.

One of the Greatest Debut Directorial features of all time, All Hail Aki Kaurismäki for the Mouchette and Jean Dielman of the 90s, what a true ode to the Great masters of celluloid Robert Bresson and Yasujiro Ozu.

pretty bleak

Plays like a follow-up to "Nights of Cabiria" until it very emphatically doesn't.

Its structure is draining with its downward emotional spiral of a story (and it wasn't exactly happy to begin with) and its insistence on putting you in Iris's shoes particularly as relates her soul crushing, monotonous job. Heartbreaking.

w/ Buket

Easy to pass by, and therefore is doomed to be sent into the void.

Fascinating study on the horrors of being a girl cursed with having the face of Rob Halford, the Metal God.

From a director whose work I have seen so far has already been minimalistic, this portrayal of an alienated Finnish woman takes it further by barely having any dialogue and humour so pitch black one might be unsure whether they should laugh or not. Its not for everyone, but it is successful in what the director attempted to do.

Fabrikada calisan kibritci kiz, ailesiyle uyumsuzluk yasamaktadir. Ailenin kiza karsi tutumu olumsuzdur. Bu arada kiz yalnizlik cekmektedir. Bir barda tanistigi adamla birlikte olur. Fakat adam kendisine iliskiyi uzun vadeli düsünmemesi gerektigini söyleyince ayrilirlar. Kadin sonra hamile oldugunu ögrenir adama haber verir. Adam orali olmaz. Kadin kürtaj yapar. Fare zehiri alir önce adami sonra ailesini zehirler. KOMEDİ DEGİL. BASİT SADE AYRINTISIZ

Estreava na Finlândia há 30 anos. Não vejo outra forma melhor para passar uma hora da sua vida do que assistindo a esse filme. BlurayRip no MakingOff.

TOMATO SLICES ON BREAD, forever etched on my mind

How It’s Made meets revenge against the patriarchy. Sequences of oppressive atmospheres snuff any glimmer of hope. Giving everything to receive nothing.

30 Ekim 08, 23:00, yonetmenin izledigilm ilk filmi & mekanik dunyaya sessiz ama derinden bir bakis. ve en sonunda clockwork orange gondermesi cok yerinde olmus. 68 dakikalik suresi sayesinde, agir tempo sikmiyor.

This is so pitch black I can hardly see how it may still be called a comedy. With typical minimalism and little dialogue, Kaurismäki describes the bleak and desperate life of a girl who resorts to harsh and desperate actions. Effective.

This 68-minute film from minimalist master Aki Kaurismäki follows a young woman so downtrodden that she resorts to committing murder. It's unrelentingly bleak but there's a strange beauty in its quiet simplicity, lack of sentimentality and absence of any moral message. It's only after the credits have rolled that its true depth becomes apparent, and ultimately it leaves one heck of a profound impression.

This is so bleak but is really helped by its run time. At barely over an hour, it cuts out any sort of excess and gets in and out, telling its story in what feels like exactly the necessary time frame for full impact. There's a lot of restraint shown by Kauismaki here. I think not showing the results of some of the actions taken later in the film was a very effective choice.

Immaculate cinematography. Movies about miserable people has to be my favorite genre.

Living in Finland must be the most demoralizing human experience. Their movies are rarely over 60 minutes long, very little is said during that time and life is portrayed as excruciating when it's not dull and uneventful. And yet one can glimpse a sense of humor through it all. And there's something beautiful about that.

Solid one joke film. Decent joke, but even at a little over an hour, I thought it could have been even shorter. ps61