Film Fatale: The Match Factory Girl, Fallen Leaves, and How Aki Kaurismäki Values the Bleakness
Words: Charlotte Amy Landrum
Make it stand out
A few years ago in my dusty flat, I decided to treat myself to a 1 hour and 9 minute film. It was a Sunday and late November (thank you Letterboxd for giving me the ability to pin down these formative dates). The perfect time to watch The Match Factory Girl, a film that even just by looking at the cover, I knew was going to be a level of bleak I might not be prepared for in my delicate state, as I was most definitely nursing myself from the scenes in the pub from the night before.
Fortunately, The Match Factory Girl – and the other works of Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki I felt obliged to watch straight after, such as Ariel (1988) and The Man Without a Past (2002) – are all about the humanness of the bleakness. The stories of suicide, alcoholism, and loneliness are framed with empathy and humour.
To Kaurismäki, the working-class lives of his depressive characters have value. He manages to make their often 90-minute or less stories, set in environments that would usually be hushed away by tourist boards, have an artistic merit, and he does this by simply embracing the lack. The lack of conversation, the lack of expression, and the lack of grandiose prospects. This is what gives his films a strange comforting feeling for those who have ever found themselves with little cash, little friends, and little purpose. His works have a similar feeling to the films of Chris Bernard and Alan Clark, but Kaurismäk’s Finnish settings made me recognise that even places that you assume are idealistic have an underbelly. No place is immune to impoverishment, as no place is immune to beauty.
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Ignorantly, the only thing I previously associated Finland with is Moomins—the sweetest, most pleasant queer creatures. The Moomins are living the dream in nature and community. Every night for the past 8 years I have slept beside a Moomin plush, and whenever a screenshot of the little beasts appears on my social media feed, a warm smile grows across my face. Lovely. But this dreamland is very different from the realities depicted in The Match Factory Girl, a story of a woman completely disconnected from everyone around her and who roams around in a Helsinki that has no grass, no warmth, and no Moomins.
Kaurismäki gives the unaware viewer a more realistic idea of what is behind the international image of Finland that draws in tourists for their culture, beautiful landscape, and Lapland, every year. With stereotypes and actual studies announcing the Nordic people as the happiest, the wealthiest, and the luckiest, I can imagine the public image of the Finnish gets old for those who do not fit into this idealistic ‘Nordic life’, despite living in places labelled as an economic paradise. It may feel like explaining to an American that not all of England is like Notting Hill (1999) or You season 4 after growing up in Merseyside. I relate: The disparity gives you the urge to grab and shake people.
The Match Factory Girl begins with the groaning of machines that are churning out matchsticks. Eventually, we see our protagonist, Iris, first with her hands moving around the already-made matchsticks in their boxes, and then her face, which holds no expression - not even boredom. The matches are already complete, and the machines speak more than Iris. She is replaceable and disposable, a fact of which she is fully aware. Ending her shift and reaching home, Iris’ parents are awful. They too don’t speak - the only noise in the one-bed apartment is from the TV constantly playing news segments of war. We quickly see that Iris is responsible for all housekeeping: cooking for them, ironing clothes, and giving them her paycheck. Iris’ mother even steals food from her plate during dinner, despite everyone having full, equally filled bowls.
But then night comes: Even for the most awkward and tragic, there is always potential at the local bar. Well, not for Iris this particular evening, as she is not picked to dance by any of the male suitors and instead sits in the corner sipping soda like a child at a family party. Suddenly, we finally hear sounds that are not the news of war or factory mechanics. This is where life comes into Kaurismäki’s films - Characters monotonously go about their days, then free will is introduced in the evenings.
No one ever fully lets loose, as Kaurismäki writes characters in a deadpan fashion that Wes Anderson can only dream of. The liveliness of the evenings and the characters are not portrayed through actors’ performances, but the camera’s central framing - a pop of colour in an outfit against an all-beige bar and the noir-style lighting. Kaurismäki doesn’t have his characters laughing out of moving car windows as Pocketful of Sunshine by Natasha Bedingfield plays. The bleakness remains, but the parallel of humanness is acknowledged as significant in their own way. Perfect shadows are cast over two characters who work jobs they hate as they have a conversation in a booth of a seedy, half-empty pub. A subtly beautiful scene that is usually only spotted by the person behind the bar.
“The liveliness of the evenings and the characters are not portrayed through actors’ performances, but the camera’s central framing - a pop of colour in an outfit against an all-beige bar and the noir-style lighting.”
Despite there being 34 years between the two, Kaurismäki’s most recent film, Fallen Leaves (2023), feels like it was made mere months after The Match Factory Girl - the only notable difference being that Fallen Leaves has a warmer feel, with romance blooming between characters Ansa and Holappa. Instead of the television showing news segments of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, it is snippets of the current Russian invasion of Ukraine. Kaurismäki is telling us how nothing has changed for many, not for those in the working classes and not for those who are the victims of war. But Kaurismäki allows these characters to be humorous regardless of the potential horrors. Simple pleasures cannot be taken away so easily. Peter Bradshaw puts it perfectly in his Guardian review: the film “laughs in the face of Putin’s threat to the country.”
The Match Factory Girl laughs in the face of its surroundings too, but in a more lethal fashion. After a one-night stand mistaking Iris for a prostitute, an accidental pregnancy with the said one-night stand, and his reply being a cheque with a note attached that reads “get rid of the brat”, our protagonist has had enough. In a cartoonish way, Iris fills up a clear glass bottle with rat poison and takes it with her to his flat, emptying some of the contents in his glass as he steps away. Then, Iris does the same at home to her parents. Her detached expression remains. This is something she has to do, and with a life so cruel to her, does it even matter? Her days spent fiddling with matchboxes being birthed out of machines says: no.
The film ends with two police officers coming in and taking her away whilst Iris is on her shift. Just like we first meet her, she still seems like she is not quite there. Any strange girl, murderous or not, is endearing to me in most films. Shots of them reading on buses during the middle of the day, sitting in empty cafes on their lonesome, and being silently snubbed by men are hard not to enjoy, especially when Kaurismäki can so effortlessly make the mundane seem significant, like it ought to be. I know when influencers say ‘romanticise your life’ they mean wearing a nice skirt even though you’re working from home or having a coffee and cigarette in the sun like Anna Karina, but I like to think of it in a more Kaurismäki fashion: enjoying the beauty that has still remained even on dirty public transport, depressive pubs and the looming threat of the end of the world.