Friday, November 7, 2008

Kaurismäki's Proletariat III: The Match Factory Girl


Aki Kaurismäki's 1990 film The Match Factory Girl is the third film in what is known as his Proleteriat Trilogy. In this film as in Shadows in Paradise and Ariel, it begins with imagery of work: as a sanitation worker, a miner, or in this case an assembly worker in a match factory. This time the film is set in Sweden instead of his native Finland. These films take their own sweet time in revealing characters and circumstance. In The Match Factory Girl there is no dialog from the characters at all for 14 minutes until Iris, the girl named in the title, orders a beer.

Kaurismäki utilizes an assured sense of economy to show his characters and their circumstances. In less than ninety minutes in each of the films (Match Factory is just a little over an hour long) we are not so much told stories about these folks as much as shown their lives. As I mentioned before in my remarks about Shadows in Paradise, the characters just seem to fall into a new set of situations over time, and not necesarily better or more positive ones.

And he does this by taking his time,. At one point in The Match Factory Girl, Iris (Kati Outinen, also in Shadows in Paradise) plays Brand New Cadillac on the jukebox in the apartment of a rockabily cook acquaintance that gives her shelter. And she sits and smokes. The shot is long, but it feels like it could be longer because it is somehow just right for this lost Goldilocks. There is an interesting connection between the characters in a Kaurismäki film and music. They seem to be near orchestras, radios, and jukeboxes which play international pop songs that might be ironic, but certainly somehow underscore the condition in which they find themselves.

His films are less like feature films than evocative novellas, long short stories that show place, individual, circumstance, and some event or events. And then the experience of this northern cold working person is over and you think about them for awhile.

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posted by well-executed buffet at 4:55 AM
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