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.)
