Iiris is not considered a beautiful girl (although I personally would protest against such a judgment), so whenever she goes to dance, she is the only one left alone by the dancers. She has to pay for her drink at the bar. At home, there is her mother and the mother's boyfriend, sitting around the whole day in cross-training-clothes (a very strange parallel between Finnish and Hungarian people), smoking, drinking vodka, watching television or what is going on outside the window. (Quite a situation which we see so often in Béla Tarr's early movies.) Iiris works in a match factory and supports both her mother and the mother's boyfriend with the money she makes. Moreover, in the evening, she washes and irons the clothes. When one day she buys her a new sexy dress, the mother's man calls her a whore and tells her to bring the cloth back so that he has more to live from it during this month. Already at this point, the most patient watcher would whack out, but Iiris carries her grief with herself alone. However, one evening, she meets a man in her bar, they dance, they drink, they go to his expensive looking apartment. When she awakes in the morning, she finds a money bill on her nightstand. When she knocks at his door a few days later, he refuses to let her in. When she finds out that she got pregnant, a few weeks later, she gets a one-sentence notice by typewriter from him saying: "Get rid of it" - together with a check destined to an abortionist.
But thanks to the non-existing god in this world of the Helsinki suburbs, Iiris is not Brecht's "Heilige Johanna Der Schlachthöfe". She enters a pharmacy and buys a good-sized package of rat poison. She chooses a nice little bottle, where she fills the lethal mixture of dissolved rat poison and goes first to the bar. Like an inverted female Jesus Christ at the Last Supper, she pours with an angel-like face a good slug of poison in the innocent-looking man's whiskey glass. And so, she goes on, from station to station, not like Federspiel's "Tiffoid Mary" an essentially unknowing killer-medium, but wholly determined Kaurismäki's "Rat Posion Iiris", a sweet-looking female death on her Danse Macabre.
But thanks to the non-existing god in this world of the Helsinki suburbs, Iiris is not Brecht's "Heilige Johanna Der Schlachthöfe". She enters a pharmacy and buys a good-sized package of rat poison. She chooses a nice little bottle, where she fills the lethal mixture of dissolved rat poison and goes first to the bar. Like an inverted female Jesus Christ at the Last Supper, she pours with an angel-like face a good slug of poison in the innocent-looking man's whiskey glass. And so, she goes on, from station to station, not like Federspiel's "Tiffoid Mary" an essentially unknowing killer-medium, but wholly determined Kaurismäki's "Rat Posion Iiris", a sweet-looking female death on her Danse Macabre.