Affairs of the heart – as well as the rest of the body – are the subject of this live-wire movie from Finnish director Alli Haapasalo, a triple-portrait of three young women in Helsinki who are looking for love or who find love looking for them. It’s a film that looks at the new possibility of sexuality, including, maybe, asexuality – the new frontier in sexual politics.
Aamu Milonoff (niece of the Finnish actor Eero Milonoff, from Border and The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki) is Mimmi: yearningly disgruntled with life and certainly with life at school where she gets into a scrap with another girl. Her friend Rönkkö (Eleonoora Kauhanen) works weekends with Mimmi at the smoothie bar at the mall, where a certain sweetly shy guy is hanging around, asking Rönkkö for a date. As for Mimmi herself, she has a coup de foudre at a party when she meets the willowy and charismatic Emma (Linnea Leino), whose own emotional and sexual life up until now has been displaced into figure skating, and who is obsessed with nailing the desperately hard triple Lutz manoeuvre. (This is an elusive experience which Haapasalo’s film wittily places in juxtaposition with other girls’ search for an orgasm – or, indeed, anyone who knows how to give any sexual pleasure at all.)
Girls Girls Girls reminded me of Lukas Moodysson’s films, such as Show Me Love and We Are the Best!, and I liked the way it showed how sex is a kind of experience and expertise that explodes into your consciousness in your teen years as something which is clearly more important than anything else in your life but which you are required to pretend is only one equal part of everything else you’re dealing with: schoolwork, family issues etc. I’m not entirely sure that the break-up-make-up dynamic between Rönkkö and Emma entirely works or is fully motivated and dramatised, but this is such a vivid, lovable triple-decker performance from Milonoff, Kauhanen and Leino.
• Girls Girls Girls is released on 30 September in cinemas.
