Tulitikkatehtaan tyttö

Another of the foreign films that I recorded off of TCM some time back and that I had to watch before it expired from the DVR is one from Finland, a country from which I haven't seen very many movies: The Match Factory Girl.

Iris (Kati Outinen) is a twentysomething woman who works at the titular match factory, not that it's particuarly stimulating or remunerative work. (It's also not really the main point of the movie; Iris could work any dead-end job.) She goes home at the end of the day to a crummy apartment here her mom and stepfather live, watching TV all day, taking Iris' pay as rent, and forcing her to do the cooking and cleaning as though she's a Cinderella. Except that this Cinderella most definitely isn't going to find an authentic Prince Charming.

Iris goes out to dance halls at night (think the sort of place where the Ernest Borgnine character in Marty went). However, none of the men select Iris for a dance. So when Iris gets her next pay packet, she takes a bunch of the cash and uses it to buy herself a dress so that she might look a little more presentable. Her parents find the dress, which isn't hard because Iris doesn't have any private space in the apartment, and are pissed. They want that money.

Iris puts on the dress and goes out, picked up by a white-collar man named Aarne. He takes her back to his place, sleeps with her, and leaves her a 1000-markka note (I want to say a bit under $200 in circa-1990 money) as though she's a prostitute. Lovely. Worse for poor Iris is that this one-night stand has left Iris pregnant. When she writes a letter to Aarne about it, he gives her a check for 10,000 markka and tells her to get rid of the brat.

Iris is more or less kicked out of the apartment and moves in with her brother, which gives her an idea for revenge on all of the man who have treated her like crap, which is basically the climax of the film. The Match Factory Girl runs a hair under 70 minutes, and that's with more substantial opening and closing credits than the short Hollywood features of the 1930s had, so the movie is even shorter.

I don't know that The Match Factory Girl is going to appeal to everyone, in part because it's so unrelentingly bleak. It also has a paucity of dialogue, although that's not such a bad thing since I assume most of the people reading this don't speak Finnish. But I found it an interesting movie, and an interesting look at Finland at a time when it was an even more out of the way place than it is even today. And, at 70 minutes, it's not like you've made too much of an investment if it turns out not to be to your liking.