"The Match Factory Girl" (1990)

Revenge. An opening kinetic sequence of a match factory at play and work, but never at rest. Sputterings and pumpings and rotations and divagations; well-oiled pops and creaky sizzles on the assembly line. Wood cut to fragpieces, slenderized to matchsticks, pushed by machine ejections into red, brown, yellow, & blue matchboxes labeled with cowboy-and-indian pics, politicos, or camels in the desert. On the tube when Iris gets home the Tiananmen Square protests, and a solitary young man who stands defiantly before an approaching row of tanks, whose act strikes the social universe down as it pauses for a heavy breath after surfacing from the deep of privations, a symbol of the world outside Finland. (Humankind made a media event.) The death of Ayatollah Khomeini. The celebrated visit of John Paul II to Scandinavia. Events which take place in a 'land beyond the sea' beyond the confines of the grim apartment in Helsinki that Iris shares with her mother and her boorish father-in-law. She makes dinner for them, washes the dishes, irons her clothes, prepares to go out in a dress as affectless as she, while her parents watch the tube and the machines in the match factory roll on with their gratuitous cadenza night & day.

Helsinki Blues. A beer and a newspaper in silence. The sight of an ostentatiously ugly dress in a store window. A check cashed, a dress purchased, a slap on the face & the word 'whore'. No matter: loneliness is loneliness. A bar scene filled with sunken eyed men. A one-night stand. Pregnancy. A cruel rebuff. An absentminded walk down the street, & a car strikes an ugly graceless girl down. (In Helsinki humankind is not an event but an assembly line.)

She hears "Cadillac" by the Renegades on the jukebox in her brother's apartment. She sits and stares at the pool table set prominently in the living room and ponders what it is like to drink rat poison. She smokes the cig and discusses with herself the offscreen harmonies that arsenic brings to the table. In contrast to the hardass blue tone of the song, she hears instead the pops and sizzles, the sputterings and pumpings that had contained her life for too long. Suicide? No. Revenge.
...
Cf. Bresson's "Mouchette"