Mimmi (Aamu Milonoff) and Rönkkö (Eleonoora Kauhanen) are Finnish High School students and ride-or-die best friends. In Alli Haapasalo’s Girl Picture, the inseparable duo attend school before working together at the mall where they hawk smoothies with names like “It Takes Two to Mango” or “Just Breathe”. On the clock, they dish about romantic trysts and the upcoming Friday’s party, sometimes to the chagrin of their customers. When Emma (Linnea Leino), their classmate and an obsessive figure skater who dreams of becoming the future European Champion, falls into Mimmi’s orbit, the pair flirt with first love. Meanwhile Rönkkö struggles through a series of unsatisfying romantic entanglements with a revolving door of expectant young men.
An introspective drama about teens who aren’t great at putting their young lives into perspective or explaining their needs, relying instead the physic ability of others, Girl Picture is a vision of girls on the cusp of womanhood. An honest LGBTQ drama that doesn’t try to soften the serious nature of their gripes with comedy, Haapasalo’s film asks us to approach the girl’s situations with the tenderness and care of a parent. As Mimmi and Emma experiment with love, Rönkkö’s desires remain more carnal. It’s pleasure she seeks and, try though she may, she can’t seem to obtain it. Each of them fail to communicate in their own way and struggle to translate their good intentions into actionable recourse. Teens will be teens. Or rather, humans will be humans.
Emma struggles to learn to let go for the first time. Her best move on the rink, the famed Triple Lutz, is suddenly evading her. In her schemes, there’s no path to the European Championship without it. Mimi is a weathervane. Living in the moment. Burying feelings of rejection born from her mom starting a new family and earmarking her as an afterthought. Rönkkö wants the proverbial “D”, yes, but she also wants pleasure to call her own.
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Acutely invested in the plight of its characters, Girl Picture takes an active interest in the interiority of Mimmi, Rönkkö, and Emma. Milonoff, Kauhanen, and Leino each lend their characters dimensionality that suggest that what they often say or do isn’t what they actually mean. And this is the crux of the film: young women figuring out how to communicate. Further, Girl Picture is that rare movie about female pleasure, particularly young female pleasure. There’s nothing sexually explicit on Haapasalo’s celluloid but the underlying drive to connect with someone sexually, or emotionally, is white hot nonetheless.
As the girls traverse upscaled high school parties, booming dance clubs, or laser tag capture the flag battles, they fight to maintain the self-image they’ve worked so hard to construct, often in destructive ways. Navigating shame and lust and rejection and expectation and regret is a complicated matter. They fail at it repeatedly. Learning how to effectively communicate is tough and the bruises are as obvious as from a hard fall on the ice. Misguided and immature, Mimmi tries to drive Emma away by being cruel, treating her like an afterthought: a cringy performance many viewers will populate with their own experiences with young love lit intentionally ablaze.
Much like its characters, Girl Picture remains delicate and sensitive, even when people aren’t on their best behavior. At its core, this is a thoughtful film about youth learning to accept life not always going as planned; about getting pulled into the orbits of those you don’t expect; about being pushed away when you try to get close; about struggling to find the words to describe what you need, whether that be sexually or romantically, or as a mother, a daughter, a friend. In one capacity, it is about the turbulence of high school and the terrifying belief that you have to decide your entire life’s trajectory by the age of 18. But it’s also about something greater: about learning how to advocate for yourself, to say what you mean, and mean what you say. At any stage in your life.
CONCLUSION: Hailing from Finland, Alli Haapasalo’s ‘Girl Picture’ is a thoughtfully constructed LGBTQ coming-of-age drama about three young women figuring out love, lust, and relationships as they teeter on the precipice of adulthood.
B
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By: Matt Oakes
Started blogging about film in college when the university paper wouldn’t have him. Dislikes your consensus film Twitter favorites. Devotee of horror movies that make him die a little inside. Catches films at festivals when he can. Proud SFCS and OFCS member and Tomatometer-approved critic. Editor-in-chief of Silver Screen Riot.
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