Girls Girls Girls

Three Finnish girls on the cusp of young adult­hood have their lives inter­sect over three con­sec­u­tive Fri­days. Divid­ing a film about con­tem­po­rary girl­hood in this way makes per­fect sense, as when you’re 17, the things that mat­ter most only seem to hap­pen over the weekend.

Mim­mi (Aamu Milonoff) is con­fi­dent yet cyn­i­cal and bois­ter­ous, let­ting on that she’s too cool to care about much. She and her endear­ing, curly-haired ride-or-die pal, Rönkkö (Eleonoo­ra Kauha­nen), both work part-time at a smooth­ie kiosk in the mid­dle of a shop­ping cen­tre, and invite them­selves to pop­u­lar kids’ house par­ties with a view to find­ing poten­tial sex partners.

Rönkkö doesn’t real­ly know what she likes and is doubt­ful about her prospects at ever hav­ing sat­is­fy­ing sex because, so far, her expe­ri­ences have been lack­lus­tre. While she’s hav­ing a mediocre encounter in the bath­room at a sub­ur­ban house par­ty, Mim­mi encoun­ters Emma (Lin­nea Leino), a high-strung fig­ure skat­ing prodigy/​popular girl arche­type who has ded­i­cat­ed her entire life to the ice rink.

The thrill of attrac­tion and infat­u­a­tion between the whim­si­cal Mim­mi and a more grace­ful Emma is cap­tured per­fect­ly by Jar­mo Kiuru’s cin­e­matog­ra­phy: the nar­row 1.33:1 aspect ratio lends the dynam­i­cal­ly-shot pic­ture an inti­mate por­trai­ture that gains its tex­ture through soft tones and a warm colour palette.

As Emma grad­u­al­ly begins to give in to the new­found, debauch­er­ous pull of par­ty­ing and dat­ing, the rela­tion­ship that starts to take shape between her and Mim­mi veers into pre­dictable ter­ri­to­ry and rote cliché (‘Slip Away’ by Per­fume Genius is becom­ing some­what of a sta­ple nee­dle drop for the genre). More impor­tant­ly, though, their rela­tion­ship is explored casu­al­ly and with­out an ounce of sen­sa­tion­al­ism, authen­ti­cal­ly cap­tur­ing the over­dra­mat­ic inten­si­ty and chaot­ic con­fu­sion of what romance feels like at such a ten­der age.

Logis­ti­cal­ly, this means that Rönkkö’s sto­ry­line is often rel­e­gat­ed to the side­lines of a nar­ra­tive that’s most­ly focused on the con­nec­tion between the oth­er two. Although the film isn’t declar­a­tive of Rönkko’s sex­u­al iden­ti­ty, asex­u­al view­ers are like­ly to res­onate with her jour­ney. Her seem­ing­ly het­ero­nor­ma­tive tra­jec­to­ry and pur­suit for sex­u­al plea­sure are mired in a lack of ful­fill­ment, mak­ing such read­ings pertinent.

It’s rare for cin­e­ma to depict a poten­tial­ly asex­u­al char­ac­ter as empa­thet­i­cal­ly as direc­tor Alli Haa­pasa­lo does here, with just the right amount of ambi­gu­i­ty to cir­cum­vent gra­tu­itous rep­re­sen­ta­tion dis­course. Haa­pasa­lo uses warmth, respect and empa­thy as her modus operan­di, allow­ing her trio to wade through the lim­i­nal cusp of adult­hood – no longer teenagers, yet not quite young adults – as they search for mean­ing through friend­ships, fleet­ing sit­u­a­tion­ships, and bud­ding roman­tic con­nec­tions. Unshack­led from shame, they are unre­served­ly free to plunge into their respec­tive jour­neys of self-explo­ration and growth, to expe­ri­ence life and not have every­thing fig­ured out.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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