• The Match Factory Girl

10/6/23 (Fri), home

Kaurismäki’s 1990 film, the droll film that really put him on the global map, sounded much grimmer than it eventually turned out to be. A woman (a young Kati Outinen) works a mind-numbing job in a drab match factory, has inert parents who do nothing but wait for her to come home and serve them (and pays them rent for the privilege), and sits alone at clubs waiting in vain to be asked to dance. When she impulsively buys a nice dress with her pay one day, her father says bluntly, “Whore!”, and her mother tells her to take it back. She wears it anyway to the club, and to her delight finally manages to find a partner, who takes her home for some fun. Unfortunately it turns out that he thought she was a prostitute, justifying the father’s suspicions about the dress, and throws money on the table as he leaves her sleeping the next morning. Still deluded, she tries to meet him again, but he tells her to get lost. She subsequently learns that she has become pregnant, but when she informs the man, he sends a large check inside a letter saying, “Get rid of it.” She tries consulting with a colleague, but when she fails to draw any interest, walks out stunned into the street and gets hit by a car. Not only that, but her family, embarrassed by her, throws her out of the house.

This is where the movie turns around from bleak to black. She rises from her hospital bed, presumably having lost the child, and goes to buy a pack of rat poison. (The saleswoman’s only response: “Small or large?”) She pours it into a flask and uses it to wreak vengeance not only on the cad who dumped her but on society itself by killing her parents and a random guy in a bar who tries to pick her up. In the remarkable final scene, she is removed from her workplace by the police, showing no surprise or resistance or emotion of any kind. The camera curiously lingers on the scene after they exit.

Though her actions should be horrific, we find ourselves somehow rooting for her. Her actions are so calm and, typically for this director, expressionless that they feel perfectly normal. Kaurismäki’s understated style has never been more effective. The girl has responded to everything with the same detachment, her disappointment or despair evident only occasionally in her eyes. We have to fill in the emotions, which conversely makes the drama more intense.

The music is perfectly attuned to the plot. A man sings in a tango of a dreamland with happy lands, flowers in bloom, and no cares in the world. Another song playing as she sits alone says, “You’ve got that something, babe.” A happy jazz melody is heard as she is cruelly rejected in the restaurant by her date. Another tango as she is led away by police goes, “When you give everything only to find disappointment / The burden of memories becomes too hard to bear.”

The film has almost no dialogue. Everyone eats in total silence with no small talk. The long sequence of tragic news reports in the background – Tiananmen (including the iconic scene of the man stopping the tanks), a deadly gas explosion in Russia, the death of Ayatollah Khomenei – contrast with the utterly unchanging drabness of the girl’s life, putting her woes into perspective.

The film is barely over an hour but manages to create a sympathetic character and a world all its own. Outinen is at her considerable best, with tremendous support from Elina Salo as her mother and especially Esko Nikkari as her stepfather (I didn’t realize he was a stepfather rather than father until I saw the credits). Great film.