The Match Factory Girl

“Don’t you hear that horrible screaming all around you? The screaming men call silence?” That’s from the start of Werner Herzog’s Kasper Hauser or Everyman for Himself and God Against All. (Best title, btw.). It’s a question Aki Kaurismäki has spent his career reiterating, occasionally switching it up with “can’t you hear the embittered laughter men call silence?” The Matchstick Girl is the most cynical of his films that I’ve seen and it may be the best. The Tiananmen Square massacre and the matchstick factory lend context to this tale of a young woman’s futile, half-hearted search for meaningful relationships. Dialogue is almost non-existent. The idea I got was that people succumb as mutely to the fate allotted them as the forests to the axe--both victims of a fundamentally exploitative society. (Tienanmen being the salient, contemporary example of society eating its young.) The implied notion of popular song as a substitute for individual self-expression was interesting. Is a comment being made on the social function of the cinema here?