Watch The Match Factory Girl For Free

Absolutely brilliant

It is not only a funny movie, but it allows a great amount of joy for anyone who watches it.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

The opening of The Match Factory Girl, the first few minutes, doesn't feature the actress Kati Outinen, who is the Girl of the title Iris - instead Kaurismäki shows us how matches are made. This sounds like it could be deathly dull, but the way it's shot and edited you see the process of it, and it's all completely impersonal. No matter what the machine keeps rolling along, stripping the wood from trees into tiny little pieces of wood that people use to make fire. I think it's important that we don't see Iris at first, and when we do first see her face it's the second shot following her hands. She could be anybody, another faceless person working at the machine that keeps on making these matches, the monotony of it, how it's so impersonal that actually having things like dreams or happiness wouldn't do much at all.This is an example of such a low-key "slice of life" narrative that is all about the banality of life and then, as it turns out, the sort of banality of evil (though there's initially a good reason for this person becoming). What leads someone, who has a pretty safe if not very equitable day job, to poison a bunch of people? Iris doesn't really have much or many prospects, and she lives in a world that is full of grays. This isn't to say the palette of the camera is gray (this isn't like Children of Men or something), but all of the objects, the buildings, the rooms, the clothes, it's a nation made out of dreary, hopeless things. So when Iris does something like, say, buy a dress to make herself slightly more attractive, her father slaps her for her gall (and for not, you know, immediately giving any extra money she has to the family).But I wonder if that added color is almost a disrupter of its own, to the aesthetic that people are comfortable with. This is a film that is quite brief - barely 68 minutes - and yet it tells a complete narrative, slim as it is, by showing us this simple chain of events: girl meets boy, boy tells girl to go away, girl is knocked up, girl asks for help, boy rejects girl, girl gets her vengeance. But this is not some exciting movie or even some piece of exploitation trash like I Spit on Your Grave (thank goodness). This is more in debt to Bresson - and later I'm pretty much certain was what Soderbergh watched before making Bubble, which I don't like anywhere near as much as this - where it's all about how people have this lack of humanity, it's repressed, it's all tucked down deep, and yet the filmmaker is deeply human and caring about the people in his line of sight.Outinen's performance is fascinating for how she does a lot with so little. Just her sitting in bed, her eyes say a lot about her present mental state, or when she cries during a movie (what movie is it, why is it making her cry, who knows, it's a movie and an escape/release for her emotions), and of course how she can show hurt without being really BIG with her emotional register. In other words this suffuses what could be a basic melodrama by making it about how she is raised in this world of the dreary and gray, but the rest of the outside world - seemingly another galaxy - has a lot worse problems (i.e. Tieneman square is brought up in a broadcast on the news, not necessarily dating it as you could put any disaster in its place) - and music is often shown her as modern or hard or rough (the original version of "Brand New Cadillac" comes at a crucial point on a jukebox).It's certainly not a movie for everyone; it moves slowly, and the director and editor cut it in such a way that shots linger longer than you may be used to. But stick with it and you'll find that it's a rather troubling and startling movie about what it means to be a part of the "working class", and a woman, without many real rights or prospects. Not exactly a happy movie, and the way it ends with its multiple murders is startling (I wondered where it came from, but honestly it's besides the point), and it's essential in a way of understanding the malaise and repetition of many people in the modern world.

Though this is the story about the Helsinki native Iiris, this story can easily be the story of any modern woman. It is the lack of "remarkable" and grandiose quality of this film that makes it so powerful. It portrays reality as clearly as possible. The photography is clinical which forces the audience to fully engage in the mundane, secretly heartbreaking universe of Iiris. The complete lack of glamor forces us to see the modern woman's suffering as it is, rather than the fantasy (a la Sex in the City) that we have been spoon-fed. I would rather be told the truth than to be told a lie or live in denial about our reality. If we don't clearly see the problems of our reality, we can never identify what it is we need to grow and change. Though Iiris chose to destroy her world rather than create a new life that she would more enjoy, I completely understand why she chose to do so. The mark of a good director is to make you care about the fate of a character. Kaurismaki did this in spades, so thank you.

Aki Kaurismaki's 1990 film TULITIKKUTEHTAAN TYTTÖ (The Match Factory Girl) caps a series of three late-1980s films (which Criterion called the "Proletarian Trilogy") where the Finnish auteur explored the tribulations of lower-class lonely hearts.The protagonist of TULITIKKUTEHTAAN TYTTÖ is Iris (Kati Outinen), a taciturn 20-something who still lives with, and financially supports, her layabout parents (Elina Salo, Esko Nikkari). Iris has no real social life to speak of, being ignored by co-workers and, at her nightly excursions to dance halls, by men. After meeting wealthy businessman Aarne (Vesa Vierikko), she thinks she has found happiness, but is cruelly abandoned by him and then her parents. Though she doesn't visibly snap, the pressures take their toll, and she ultimately gets her revenge on those who have done her wrong...As the film progresses, radio and television in the background report the news of Chinese government forces suppressing the protest in Tiananmen Square. That overt political focus is something rather unusual for Kaurismäki. He has usually included some criticism of state bureaucracy in his films, but here the film is entirely a metaphor for what might happen if the people are held down too hard and too long. Kati Outinen has one of the quirkiest faces in cinema, but here makeup and lighting accentuate those looks and she becomes the very image of misery.TULITIKKUTEHTAAN TYTTÖ fits with Kaurismäki's general aesthetic in that the film features décor and music from the 1950s, although it is ostensibly set in the present day. His penchant for minimal dialogue here is taken even further than usual. What sets this film apart from the rest of his output, however, is that it lacks his characteristic deadpan humour. Even when he focuses on the underdogs staying under, there's usually some chuckles in his work. Consequently, I found TULITIKKUTEHTAAN TYTTÖ often unpleasantly bleak, less enjoyable than his other films. Nonetheless, the streamlined script and careful cinematography make this a film worth seeing at least once.

Iiris is not considered a beautiful girl (although I personally would protest against such a judgment), so whenever she goes to dance, she is the only one left alone by the dancers. She has to pay for her drink at the bar. At home, there is her mother and the mother's boyfriend, sitting around the whole day in cross-training-clothes (a very strange parallel between Finnish and Hungarian people), smoking, drinking vodka, watching television or what is going on outside the window. (Quite a situation which we see so often in Béla Tarr's early movies.) Iiris works in a match factory and supports both her mother and the mother's boyfriend with the money she makes. Moreover, in the evening, she washes and irons the clothes. When one day she buys her a new sexy dress, the mother's man calls her a whore and tells her to bring the cloth back so that he has more to live from it during this month. Already at this point, the most patient watcher would whack out, but Iiris carries her grief with herself alone. However, one evening, she meets a man in her bar, they dance, they drink, they go to his expensive looking apartment. When she awakes in the morning, she finds a money bill on her nightstand. When she knocks at his door a few days later, he refuses to let her in. When she finds out that she got pregnant, a few weeks later, she gets a one-sentence notice by typewriter from him saying: "Get rid of it" - together with a check destined to an abortionist.But thanks to the non-existing god in this world of the Helsinki suburbs, Iiris is not Brecht's "Heilige Johanna Der Schlachthöfe". She enters a pharmacy and buys a good-sized package of rat poison. She chooses a nice little bottle, where she fills the lethal mixture of dissolved rat poison and goes first to the bar. Like an inverted female Jesus Christ at the Last Supper, she pours with an angel-like face a good slug of poison in the innocent-looking man's whiskey glass. And so, she goes on, from station to station, not like Federspiel's "Tiffoid Mary" an essentially unknowing killer-medium, but wholly determined Kaurismäki's "Rat Posion Iiris", a sweet-looking female death on her Danse Macabre.