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Notes from Underground

  And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment.  Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
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Hope

To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.-- Erich Fromm


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THE MATCH FACTORY GIRL (1990)




"The Match Factory Girl" is the third film in Kaurismaki's Proletariat Trilogy. It follows "Shadows in Paradise," about a aimless garbage collector and "Ariel" (1988), about a coal miner who escapes his subterranean work by turning to crime. The three films have been packaged together and released by Criterion.

''The Match Factory Girl'' opens with production line in a factory that follows the stages in which wood get treated to get to the final product at the end of line, which is box of matches. At the end of this long mechanical chain stands Iris  making certain the mailing labels are stuck securely on the boxes.

The Match Factory Girl (1990) Opening Sequence

 She pays rent to her mother and stepfather to sleep on the couch. She puts on cheap makeup, goes to a dance only to find herself  the only woman left sitting against the wall at end of the evening. 
One day she makes a bold step ,without knowledge of her parents she takes part of her paycheck  to buy a cheap-looking red-flowered dress in which she goes to a dance.



This poor girl. I wanted to reach out my arms and hug her. That was during the first half of "The Match Factory Girl." Then my sympathy began to wane. By the end of the film, I think it's safe to say Iris gives as good as she gets.
The Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki fascinates me. I am never sure if he intends us to laugh or cry with his characters--both, I suppose. He often portrays unremarkable lives of unrelenting grimness, sadness, desolation. When his characters are not tragic, he elevates them to such levels as stupidity, cluelessness, self-delusion or mental illness. Iris, the match factory girl, incorporates all of these attributes.
"This cannot be tragedy because she lacks the stature to be a heroine. It cannot be comedy because she doesn't get the joke. What can it be?"


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FILM DIRECTORS-AKI KAURISMAKI >>>







The Match Factory Girl is a bleakly comic tragedy that follows Iris (Kati Outinen), a plain, quiet young woman who works on a matchbox assembly line in Helsinki. Her life is a cycle of repetitive labor at the factory and emotional servitude at home, where she supports her unloving mother and lazy, abusive stepfather. After a series of cruel betrayals—a one-night stand that leads to a rejected pregnancy and further abuse from her parents—the habitually passive Iris finally snaps, embarking on a cold, calculated path of revenge.





Themes and Style

1. Minimalism and "The Bresson Effect"

Kaurismäki famously stated he wanted to make a film that would make Robert Bresson (the master of cinematic austerity) look like a director of "epic action pictures."

  • Silence: There is almost no dialogue for the first 15 minutes. Emotions are conveyed through the radio, the television, and Kati Outinen's "impenetrable" face.

  • Static Cinematography: The camera rarely moves, framing the characters in beige, dingy interiors that emphasize their entrapment.

2. The "Little Match Girl" Subversion

The film is a modern, cynical retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl. While Andersen’s protagonist finds relief through a freezing death and a vision of heaven, Kaurismäki’s Iris takes agency. Her "heaven" is not spiritual; it is the grim satisfaction of removing the people who exploited her. She moves from a prison of poverty to a literal prison, but for the first time, it is on her own terms.

3. Historical Grounding

Throughout the film, television news broadcasts show the Tiananmen Square protests and the death of Ayatollah Khomeini. This creates a sharp contrast between the "small" tragedy of Iris’s lonely life and the "large" geopolitical tragedies of 1989, suggesting that violence and oppression exist on every scale of human existence.

4. Deadpan Humor

Despite the grim subject matter, the film is considered a comedy by many critics. The humor is "dry as a bone," derived from the absurdity of the characters' silence and the hyper-efficiency of Iris’s eventual murder spree.





Legacy

The Match Factory Girl cemented Kati Outinen as Kaurismäki’s muse and established the director’s signature style: a mixture of 1950s rock-and-roll aesthetics, social realism, and a uniquely Finnish brand of melancholic wit. It holds a rare 100% on Rotten Tomatoes and was added to Roger Ebert’s "Great Movies" list.






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