Iris works in a match factory. She lives in a shabby home, and pays the rent for her mother and abusive stepfather. Bored from this grey existence, she goes to a dance hall and lands in bed with the bearded Aarne. The next morning, he leaves money for her. She tries to contact him, but he was only interested in a one-night hook-up. Iris finds out she is pregnant, but Aarne wants her to abort. When she is hit by a car, Iris has a miscarriage. She loses patience, buys rat poison, mixes it and puts it into Aarne’s drink. She also poisons drinks of her parents. Afterwards, two police inspectors take Iris outside of the factory.
Included in Roger Ebert's Great Movies list, "The Match Factory Girl" is an untypically serious and almost humorless film by Aki Kaurismaki, depicting a grey existence of the heroine Iris who gets so fed up with this bad life that she rebels and explodes, "Why Does Mr. R. Run Amok?"-style. In some other aspects, this is typical Kaurismaki, depicting desolate, plain outsiders disappointed by life, constructed on minimalist, unglamorous storyline, similarly like Jarmusch did, and flat cinematography. The movie is remarkably simple, proving once again that Kaurismaki is consistenly good, but rarely rises to some greatness or a more versatile spectrum of a viewing experience. Some subtle touches work nicely: for instance, the opening act depicts characters watching TV news reports of the Tiananmen Square protests, which could be seen as a parallel or foreshadowing to Iris' state of mind, who will also protest due to her frustration with her rigid life. In the hospital sequence, the stepfather's head is not shown, the camera is lowered and just depicts his torso, to imply how distant he is and has no emotions towards her. Also an interesting contrast is presented in the moment where Iris is watching a Marx bros. movie in cinema—but instead of laughing, she is crying from sadness. When Iris goes to a botanical garden at night, she sits next to a Selenicereus grandiflorus, a flower which blooms only once a year during the night—was it to imply that Iris' dark side untypically awakened during these circumstances? Disappointment and disillusionment are the main themes of "The Match Factory Girl", yet it is somewhat too slight, thin, simplistic and ordinary to truly engage on a higher level, with deliberately artificial gestures, Bresson-style, which inhibit the emotions of the characters. Everything in it is good, but it is difficult to pinpoint when it gets great.
Grade:++
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