Aki Kaurismäki concludes the Proletariat Trilogy with THE MATCH FACTORY GIRL
THE MATCH FACTORY GIRL (TULITIKKUTEHTAAN TYTTÖ) (Aki Kaurismäki, 1990)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Thursday, February 13, 5:00 & 9:30
Series runs through February 18
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki completes his conceptual Proletariat Trilogy with the bleakest, most deadpan of the three examinations of working-class life with the wickedly funny, blacker-than-black comedy The Match Factory Girl. The follow-up to 1986’s Shadows in Paradise and 1988’s Ariel, the finale tells the sad story of a poor young woman who just can’t seem to catch a break. Kaurismäki regular Kati Outinen stars as Iris, an assembly-line drone who makes way too much out of a rare one-night stand with the devastatingly disinterested Aarne (Vesa Vierikko), leading to all kinds of problems for her, both professionally and personally. Continuing the subtly dramatic color scheme of the previous two films, cinematographer Timo Salminen, set designer Risto Karhula, and Kaurismäki add sly bursts of blue and orange as things keep getting worse and worse for Iris, who, despite her name, doesn’t really see the world for what it is, instead living in a bizarre kind of fantasy until she decides to do something about it. The Match Factory Girl cemented Kaurismäki’s reputation as one of the most fascinating young international filmmakers, which he’s lived up to with such later favorites as Juha, Cannes Grand Prix winner The Man Without a Past, and Le Havre. The Match Factory Girl is screening on February 13 as part of the BAMcinématek series “Vengeance Is Hers,” twelve days of films featuring fabulous woman protagonists and antagonists, including Sissy Spacek in Carrie, Sandrine Bonnaire in Secret Defense, Olivia de Havilland in The Heiress, Lily Ho and Betty Pei Ti Ting in Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan, and Pam Grier in Coffy.
“Sometimes, reality is too complex for oral communication. But legend embodies it in a form which enables it to spread all over the world,” a growly, disembodied, mechanical-like voice says at the beginning of Jean-Luc Godard’s futuristic sci-fi noir thriller, Alphaville: Une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution. Godard’s 1965 black-and-white masterpiece takes place in an unidentified time period in a dark, unadorned, special-effects-free Paris. A tough-as-nails man in hat and trench coat named Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) has arrived in Alphaville from the Outlands, claiming to be journalist Ivan Johnson, on assignment from the Figaro-Pravda newspaper. But his real mission is to first find fellow agent Henry Dickson (Akim Tamiroff), then capture or kill Alphaville leader and death-ray inventor Professor Vonbraun (Howard Vernon), the former Leonard Nosferatu. A Guadalcanal veteran who drives a Ford Galaxie, Caution — a character Constantine played in a series of films based on the novels of Peter Cheyney, including This Man Is Dangerous, Dames Get Along, and Your Turn, Darling — is a no-nonsense guy who takes nothing for granted. “All things weird are normal in this whore of cities,” he tells a blond seductress third class, who apparently comes with his hotel room. Documenting everything he sees with an Instamatic flash camera, Caution (perhaps a stand-in for Godard himself?) is soon visited by Natasha Vonbraun (Anna Karina), the professor’s daughter, setting off on an Orwellian journey through a grim city where poetry and emotion, and such words as “love,” “why,” and “conscience,” are banned in favor of “because” and “Silence. Logic. Security. Prudence,” where the hotel Bible is actually an ever-changing dictionary and enemies of the state are killed in swimming pools and pulled out by clones of Esther Williams, all overseen by a computer known as Alpha 60 (whose text, based on writings by Jorge Luis Borges, is eerily spoken by a man without a larynx, using a mechanized voice box). 
After screening at more than seventy-five international film festivals over the past two years, Juan Carlos Maneglia and Tana Schémbori’s Paraguayan thriller, 7 Boxes, is getting its official U.S. theatrical release February 7, opening at Cinema Village. The low-budget film, which was made for about half a million dollars and broke box-office records in its native country, is set in and around Municipal Market No. 4 in Paraguay’s capital city, Asunción, where seventeen-year-old Victor (Celso Sebastián Franco Ferreira) pushes a rickety wheelbarrow, helping people with their purchases, sometimes accompanied by his friend Liz (Lali González). Always on the lookout to make a quick buck in order to afford a cell phone and a television, Victor gets a call from Gus (Roberto Cardozo), asking him to make an important delivery because Gus’s usual accomplice, Nelson (Víctor Sosa Traverzi), cannot be reached and it’s an emergency. So Victor jumps at the opportunity, not caring what’s in the boxes even though he knows something shady’s going on, instead simply taking half of a hundred-dollar bill, the second half of which will be given to him upon completion of his task. But it’s not going to be very easy, because when Nelson finds out about it, he is determined to do whatever it takes to steal the deal for himself. Meanwhile, Victor’s sister, Tamara (Nelly Dávalos), is concerned not only about the trouble her younger brother might be in but also about her pregnant coworker, Leti (Katia García), who is getting no help from the father, Gus, who is more worried about what his bosses, the comic-relief duo of Don Dario (Paletita) and Luis (Nico García), are going to do to him when they learn how nothing has gone quite as planned. Maneglia and Schémbori’s debut feature, following a long career in shorts and television, has its moments, but there are far too many head-scratching plot holes, red herrings, inconsistencies, and hard-to-believe twists that detract from the film’s energy, which works best when it focuses on Victor and his desire to better his station, through technology. While Victor is a sympathetic character, played with a wide-eyed innocence by Franco, his nemesis, Nelson, is a lost cause from the start, desperate to make money to buy medicine for his sick child but never really having a moral center. Still, it’s an admirable achievement coming from a country that has produced so few full-length films. Maneglia and Schémbori will be at Cinema Village for Q&As after the 7:10 screenings on February 7 & 8.
For forty years, French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann has been documenting the Holocaust and the birth of the state of Israel in such provocative and powerful films as Israel, Why; Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 P.M.; and his nine-and-a-half-hour masterpiece, Shoah. In 1997, he made A Visitor from the Living, built around a 1979 interview with International Red Cross worker Maurice Rossel, who led a delegation inspecting the Nazis’ so-called “model ghetto” of Theresienstadt, which turned out to be a glorified concentration camp. Lanzmann returns to the Czech camp in The Last of the Unjust, an utterly fascinating 218-minute documentary consisting of a series of interviews he conducted in Rome in 1975 with Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein, the only Jewish Elder to survive the Holocaust. For years, Murmelstein, who was appointed directly by and reported to Obersturmbannführer Adolph Eichmann, has been declared a Nazi collaborator, by writer Hannah Arendt and many others, even being arrested, imprisoned, and tried by Czech authorities. But in The Last of the Unjust, he paints a vivid portrait of everyday life in Theresienstadt, claiming he was not a collaborator but instead was doing whatever he could to improve conditions for the Jews there.
