Girl Picture: Love, Skating and Smoothies, Finnish-Style

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B

The winner of the audience award in the World Dramatic Competition at this year’s Sundance, Girl Picture is a Finnish film about a couple of senior high-school girls first learning about sexuality.

Though feelings are hurt and angry words exchanged, nothing very bad or sensational happens, unlike almost any other movie or TV series with the word “girl” in the title. Directed by Alli Haapasalo and written by Ilona Ahti and Daniel Hakulinen, it is an empathetic, almost sociological portrait that could be shown in health class in a progressive high school.

Two of the girls, Mimmi and Rönkkö, work in a smoothie bar at the mall. They are also friends in school. Mimmi (Aamu Milonoff) has dark hair, broad cheeks, an insolent smirk and, as teachers used to say, “an attitude problem.”

For example, Mimmi doesn’t really care about field hockey practice and when a teammate calls her out for her indifferent play, she takes her stick gives the girl a resounding whack across the ankle.

Rönkkö (Eleonoora Kauhanen) has blond curls and an overbite. She gets along with everyone, but she has a different kind of issue. She can’t have an orgasm when she has sex, so she’s convinced “there’s something wrong with me” rather than, say, with the teenaged boys with whom she is having sex, but that doesn’t stop her from still trying.

Mimmi has better luck with sex when she meets up with Emma (Linnea Leino), a willowy, competitive figure skater. Emma has led a sheltered, competition-focused life and, after a passionate night, falls hard for her first love.

Mimmi is reluctant to be pinned down and, cruelly, hits on guys in front of the besotted Emma. The sociology tendency of the film can get a bit in the way. Mimmi’s bad-ass personality is explained by her self-absorbed mom, who has a new family.

Rönkkö, meanwhile, is doggedly in her search of the Big O. When she decides to ask a boy for what she wants in a bedroom at a party, he complains that “Reading out a manual for your genitals isn’t exactly a turn-on,” before heading back to join his friends. (Not a book guy, apparently.)

With another promisingly sweetly passive boy, she gets drunk, scares the guy with her attempts to sound worldly about sex, and then pukes on his chest. He’s sweet about it but the moment has passed, and she starts to think maybe she needs to take things a little more gradually.

The best action in the film though, is not between the sheets or on the film’s filler dance club scenes, but at the smoothie bar, where Rönkkö and Mimmi — who are both smart and funny — compare notes, offer each other each other advice and solace about the same old issues for a new generation. As Shakespeare almost said, the course of true love never did run smoothie.

Girl Picture. Directed by Alli Haapasalo and written by Ilona Ahti and Daniel Hakulinen. Starring: Aamu Milonoff, Eleonoora Kauhanen and Linnea Leino. In theatres August 12.