17 year old friends Mimmi (Aamu Milonoff) and Rönkkö (Eleonoora Kauhanen) are pretty typical teenage girls, dealing with the boredom of Finland’s long winters nights and with the normal travails of relationships. Across three Fridays and a Saturday, Mimmi develops a relationship with championship skater Emma (Linnea Leino, who appears to do most of her own skating) and Rönkkö tries to find someone who can help her enjoy sex.
I watch a lot of coming of age movies, and I would bet that director Alli Haapasalo and writers Ilona Ahti and Daniela Hakulinen do as well, because Girls Girls Girls (which has also been released under the English title Girl Picture) is very reminiscent of a lot of genre pieces that have gone before it. In particular the influences of Sciamma and Moodysson loom large. These are good places to be pulling from, and the film spins variations on familiar moments well enough that it doesn’t become entirely a patchwork of things we’ve seen before, but the broad strokes feel very rote at times.
Where Girls Girls Girls really succeeds is in its performances. Aamu Milonoff and Eleonoora Kauhanen don’t actually share that many scenes, given that they are playing best friends, but we believe in the dynamic between them. Differences between them come through in things as trivial as film choice (Rönkkö wasn’t keen on Last Year at Marienbad) but also in larger ways, especially their approach to relationships. However, we see that the two are supportive and care about each other even, perhaps especially, after they blow up at each other in a big argument. The performances carry a lightness and familiarity between the two that convinces us that there is history behind their friendship, which also means they can comfortably spend time with different groups, but still be close.
Linnea Leino is mostly in scenes only with Milonoff. The chemistry between them is strong throughout, on the first night they hang out there is almost a magnetic pull (though the film does surprise with who the collision between them first comes from) and the blissful early days of their relationship are some of the film’s most carefree and energetic scenes. Ironically, the strength of the chemistry and the way the audience is able to connect with it is perhaps one of the reasons that an early third act development doesn’t ring true. Even the script, otherwise solid, can’t come up with much in the way of motivation for the choice. The performances remain strong, but can’t help but feel a little hollow in these sequences.
Many of the best things about this film lie in its smaller details. Some of these come in the performances: Kauhanen is excellent during an encounter with a boy at a party, which perfectly captures the awkward side of sex, and Rönkkö’s struggle to communicate what she really wants in bed. Milonoff, for her part, is especially good in scenes mentioning Mimmi’s absentee mother, particularly a scene late in the film where she explains her situation to a mall cop (a terrific one scene turn from Tuuli Heinonen).
Director Alli Haapasalo fills out the world she is building beautifully. Things like the badge that says “I don’t think so”, which Mimmi has pinned above the patch on her work uniform saying “Expand your horizons” give us an insight into her without the need for any dialogue. Another thing that is well integrated into the world of the film, and something I’ve not seen before, is the approach that the girls and the boys who surround them have to sex. Every encounter we see has multiple consent check ins, it’s a great way of saying something about Gen Z and their attitudes without needing to have a long discourse on the politics of sex, casual or otherwise.
These details lift the film, they colour the world in, but they can’t quite lift the plot out of its familiar and often predictable machinations. That said, Girls Girls Girls is worth seeing for its performances alone and, with only her second solo feature, marks out Alli Haapasalo as someone worth watching
