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MovieMail's Review
Nearly twenty years after self-deprecating Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki's films first gained British distribution, he's still an unjustly neglected talent, despite being Scandinavia's most instantly recognisable auteur since Ingmar Bergman. Occupying a strange hinterland between the working-class realism of Ken Loach and the dead-pan comedies of Jim Jarmusch (a passionate fan), their visual style resembles Edward Hopper paintings come to life, their soundtracks beguilingly blend traditional rock'n'roll and accordion-led tango,
and their characters mutely accept everything that life throws at them with a deadpan passivity that recalls Robert Bresson or Buster Keaton, depending on whether you regard them as art movies or poker-faced comedies. This set (the first of four) collects his 'proletarian trilogy', which began with his third
feature Shadows in Paradise. This introduced many of his recurring themes, as well as his two favourite actors, Kati Outinen and the late Matti Pellonpää. The latter plays lugubrious bin-man Nikander, whose drooping moustache conveys more in a single hangdog glance than reams of dialogue ever could. His life is a mournful litany of dreary routines, unrealised plans and unfulfilled promises, and his romance with supermarket cashier Ilona (Outinen) barely gets off the ground: his idea of a hot date is a trip to a run-down bingo hall. Far happier is the liaison in Ariel between redundant miner Taisto and traffic warden Irmeli, though it's tested to the limit by Taisto's imprisonment for a crime utterly defensible by any yardstick other than the
one laid down by the law. At first sight, The Match Factory Girl seems unwatchably bleak as it pitilessly charts its protagonist Iris's life from the drudgery of the factory floor to parental indifference to unwanted
pregnancy, with Outinen's sullenly numbed expression conveying an encyclopaedia of emotional information (Kaurismäki's films are never exactly garrulous, but this one is practically silent). But her ultimate revenge against an indifferent world finally turns the film into pitch-black comedy and the most ruthlessly focused film in Kaurismäki's output; he claimed that he wanted to make 'a film that makes Bresson look like a director of epic action pictures'.
Contains the three films in Kaurismaki's 'workers' trilogy - Shadows in Paradise (1986), Ariel (1988) and The Match Factory Girl (1990).
With low-key acting, minimal dialogue and humour so deadpan it practically isn't humour at all, Kaurismaki tells simple, devastating stories of loss, love, compassion and the urge to escape. In Shadows in Paradise, garbage man Nikander strikes up a relationship with a cashier in a Helsinki supermarket. This was Kaurismaki's first collaboration with Kati Outinen, an actress whose face is emblematic of his cinema.
In Ariel, a coal miner whose father has committed suicide heads off in his his white Cadillac through Finland's snowy wastes in a search for work, love and escape.
The Match Factory Girl tells the excrutiatingly sad story of Iris, a worker on an assembly line, who lives with her dour parents, and has a disastrous social life. Then she gets pregnant by a man who thought she was a prostitute.
