On the films of Aki Kaurismäki and the specific quality of deadpan they achieve.

Kaurismäki's films — The Match Factory Girl, The Man Without a Past, Le Havre, The Other Side of Hope — are set in a version of Finland (and occasionally elsewhere) that is not the actual Finland but a highly specific stylized version of it: the lighting is warm but slightly flat, the performances are minimal, the dialogue is spare to the point of abstraction.

The deadpan is not irony. Kaurismäki is not commenting on his characters' suffering from a superior position. He is depicting suffering with a formal restraint that prevents sentimentality without preventing sympathy.

The Match Factory Girl is the most concentrated example: a woman who is systematically mistreated by everyone around her, depicted without a single scene of explicit pathos. The camera watches her eat, travel to the dance hall, return home. The absence of music, the absence of reaction shots, the absence of the formal permissions that usually tell an audience 'it's okay to feel sad' — all of these create a feeling of helpless witnessing that the film's slight runtime intensifies.

The final act of The Match Factory Girl is one of the great acts of formal revenge in cinema: the audience's restrained sympathy is converted into something more active without a single indication that this was always the film's direction.