The Match Factory Girl

austin4.0

Tomatoes on white bread as a meal.Finland is one giant existential nightmare.

Eli Hayes4.5

Which came first,the silence,or the sadness?

Edgar Cochran ✝️🍋5.0

The Mouchettes, the Jeanne Dielmans and the Lilya's scattered across Europe and the world keep being presented under the same silent, scoreless, cold-staring, restrained and resilient tragic scope that Chantal Akerman started in the 70s with her complex and alienating psychological analyses of social detachment and inner emotional disasters.Iris is no different. We only see her smile twice, and both times happens while she's reading. The tiniest of details of her monotonous and frustrating existence are maximized by the perfectly calculated framing of Kaurismäki, who presents his shots as an Akerman apprentice but chops abruptly his sequences like Haneke did one year prior in his Austrian self-destructive family manifesto, a technique that Kitano would apply in the 90s. The almost absolute lack of dialogue accentuates the power of implicit acting in a celluloid masterpiece where circumstances are supposed to speak stronger than words, and with Timo Salminen's cinematography, they hell sure do. The camera seldom dares to move as scenarios are fixed, just like Iris' life: immobile and directionless. Ming-liang understood the importance of this and that is why he rarely dares to move the camera.For those unbeknownst to the definition of "plot point", a plot point is a specific event or action that triggers or twists the definitive direction of the trama. In this case, it is Iris' pregnancy. The Match Factory Girl has, at least for artistic reasons, the perfect graphical representation of the arrival of the plot point. By the time she realizes the pregnancy test turned out to be positive, the camera zooms in into her face quickly as the film had never done. And it never does again. The audience is left frozen as she is. That is excellent directing.Often claimed to be Kaurismäki's first film, The Match Factory Girl is a quick, hard-hitting and shattering essay on the resilience of the human spirit against opposing life forces and how one's soul can cope with it, but not everybody succeeds in this struggle called "life". The final act masterfully introduces the debate of justice vs. empathy vs. moral in a way that makes us question the authenticity of our actions, regardless of our knowledge of the consequences. A true homework has been left for us, for the mind and for the heart.96/100