From the February 19, 1993 Chicago Reader. I may have underrated this movie. — J.R.
THE MATCH FACTORY GIRL
** (Worth seeing)
Directed and written by Aki Kaurismaki
With Kati Outinen, Elina Salo, Esko Nikkari, Vesa Vierikko, Reijo Taipale, and Silu Seppala.
Here’s what Finnish writer-director Aki Kaurismaki has written about The Match Factory Girl:
“Suddenly, last spring, I was running aimlessly around the city, talking too much and twisting and shaking my head in the most ridiculous way.
“The next day I spent lying silently under my bed and hated myself bitterly. In revenge I decided to make a film that will make Robert Bresson seem like a director of epic action pictures.
“Later, I named this piece of junk The Match Factory Girl (Tulitikkutehtaan Tytto), as the name is long enough to be easily forgotten.”
A few glosses on the above:
(1) It’s typical of Kaurismaki, who’s given to dandy’s gestures, that we don’t know what he means by “revenge,” though we certainly know what the film’s mousy title heroine, Iris (Kati Outinen), means by it.
(2) The statement clearly asks to be read as a series of hip disclaimers: “running aimlessly,” “talking too much,” “twisting and shaking my head in the most ridiculous way,” “this piece of junk . Read more
This review appeared in the November 6, 1987 issue of the Chicago Reader. J.R.-
MAMMAME
**** (Masterpiece)
Directed by Raoul Ruiz
Choreographed by Jean-Claude Gallotta
With the Emile Dubois Dance Company.
The more attention is paid to stylizing the screen, to make the quality of how it looks convey the meaning, the closer you get to dance, which is precisely that — the communication of meaning through the quality of movement. — Maya Deren
While it seems plausible, even likely, that Raoul Ruiz is currently the most inventive filmmaker working in Europe, one does not ordinarily go to his work looking for masterpieces. An obsessive doodler — in the same serious way, one should add, that the cartoonist Saul Steinberg is, combining philosophical and metaphysical wit with a penchant for rethinking the world so that it encompasses his boundless energies — Ruiz is blessed and cursed by never knowing when to stop. Indeed, one could argue that his interest in producing lively work, combined with his disinterest in producing masterpieces, has made him the most prolific and proliferating idea man to have emerged in the cinema since Godard. Born 11 years after Godard (1941) in Chile, Ruiz started work on his first feature the year after Breathless (1960), but it wasn’t until he became an exile in France, following the Chilean military coup of September 1973, that his career began to accelerate to Godardian proportions. Read more
Written for MUBI, who published it in January 2024.
According to the literary scholar Fredric Jameson, who contributes an enthusiastic preface and afterword, Reading with Jean-Luc Godard — a compendium of 109 three-page essays by 49 writers from a dozen countries — launches “a new form” and “a new genre”. It can be described as a user-friendly volume designed to occupy the same space between academia and journalism staked out by MUBI while proposing routes into Godard’s work provided by his eclectic reading — a batch of writers ranged alphabetically and intellectually from Louis Aragon, Robert Ardrey, Hannah Arendt, and Honoré de Balzac to François Truffaut, Paul Valéry, A.E. Van Vogt, and Virginia Woolf. (Full disclosure: I contributed one of the two pieces on Truffaut, devoted to how his best piece of Alfred Hitchcock criticism helped to shape Godard’s and why Truffaut omitted that major text from his own books.) Some authors, such as Marguerite Duras, Martin Heidegger, and Edgar Allan Poe, get more than one entry, and coeditor Timothy Barnard wrote all four of those devoted to André Malraux. Indeed, he and coeditor Kevin J. Hayes are responsible for almost half of the entries.
One of the book’s fringe benefits is canonical, offering a list of writers that includes many obscure names worthy of discovery. Read more
