Product Details

• Actors: Jean-Pierre Léaud, Margi Clarke, Kenneth Colley, Kati Outinen, Elina Salo
• Directors: Aki Kaurismäki
• Writers: Aki Kaurismäki, Peter von Bagh
• Producers: Aki Kaurismäki, David Kelly, Katinka Faragó, Klas Olofsson, Martin Bruce-Clayton
• Format: PAL
• Language: English, Finnish
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Kino International
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B00004R733

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

The most compact and stylistically impressive of Aki Kaurismäki's perversely minimalist Finnish comedies, The Match Factory Girl stars his blond, blank-faced Garbo, Kati Outinen, as a downtrodden factory worker whose attempts to discover love and companionship are constantly thwarted by her possessive parents and a succession of cloddish, exploitative men. Kaurismäki's deadpan style--the carefully inexpressive acting, motionless camera, and rigidly geometrical compositions--avoids both sentimentality and sarcasm. Although the girl's plight is taken seriously, there is something in the extremity of the situations, and in the lovingly depicted hideousness of her Helsinki home life, that is irresistibly comic. Inspired by the Tiananmen Square uprising, the match factory girl resolves to take a revolutionary stand, arms herself with a packet of rat poison, and sets out for revenge. The video includes an equally hilarious music-video rendition of "Those Were the Days" by Kaurismäki's house band, the Leningrad Cowboys. --Dave Kehr

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The neo realism italian resurrected in this little gem!, December 12, 2004

By 

Hiram Gomez Pardo (Valencia, Venezuela) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Match Factory Girl [VHS] (VHS Tape)

The essential clues will be found through a meticulous analysis of the viewer all along the story .
The serious breakdown of the girl can not be seen as an isolated fact . Kaurismaki through his merciless eye-camera will lead to a dead city where the relationships are not cold . Simply they are absent . The emotive liasons are not present in her vocabulary and her loneliness , despair and hopeless will make of her a little monster closed behind a shell created to prevent of any human being .
Her unhappy affair with that nasty boyfriend is the last drop that will surpass the glass before she decides to cross the forbidden line between sanity and insanity .
It is not a simple revenge . It a statement against a not human world deaf , mude and blind .
A must see this minimalist and clever film of Finland .

3.0 out of 5 stars Kaurismäki's sparsest and most overtly political film, January 22, 2012

By 

Christopher Culver - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Match Factory Girl ( Tulitikkutehtaan tyttö ) [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.2 Import - Finland ] (DVD)

Aki Kaurismaki's 1990 film TULITIKKUTEHTAAN TYTTÖ (The Match Factory Girl) caps a loose trilogy where the Finnish auteur explored the tribulations of lower-class lonely hearts. This Amazon listing describes a standalone DVD, but you can now get this film along with the other instalments of the "Proletariat Trilogy" in a Criterion Collection box set.

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 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.

4.0 out of 5 stars GREAT, October 6, 2007

By 

Daniel S. "Daniel" (Geneva, Switzerland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Match Factory Girl ( Tulitikkutehtaan tyttö ) [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.2 Import - Finland ] (DVD)

1990. Written and directed by Aki Kaurismäki. 4 Finnish Academy awards. The tragic story of Iris, a working-class girl looking for love. Superb.