Being a teenager can be a difficult time, especially (I would imagine) for those assigned female at birth. When one bears this in mind, it becomes understandable that teenage girlhood has proven to be such a fertile subject for international cinema, with examples as wide-ranging as Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart, Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Color and Suzanne Lindon’s Spring Blossom all tackling adolescent female sexual development in varying ways. 44-year-old Finnish filmmaker Alli Haapasalo is the latest director to cast her lens over this well-worn subject with Girl Picture. She does a good job directorially and manages to imbue the material she has been tasked with handling with a reasonable amount of panache and entertainment value, but ultimately, the film is let down by a weak screenplay from Ilona Ahti and Daniela Hakulinen that is both clichéd and lacking in focus.
The film takes place in an unnamed city in what is presumably modern-day Finland. The anachronistic fashions in the film’s opening scenes denote a late ‘80s/early ‘90s setting, but the ubiquity of smartphones in the scenes that follow suggests that the setting is more contemporary. The story centers on three girls, Mimmi (Aamu Milonoff), Rönkkö (Eleonoora Kauhanen) and competitive figure skater Emma (Linnea Leino), in their mid-to-late teens. Mimmi and Rönkkö work together at a smoothie concession in a shopping mall. Mimmi and Emma begin a budding romance that quickly turns sexual. Rönkkö, who has no sexual interest in persons of the same sex but wishes she did as she finds it very difficult to orgasm from sexual contact with boys, feels slightly envious of the close bond Mimmi and Emma forge with each other.
The film plausibly portrays the frustrations (sexual and otherwise) of being a teenage girl, but Ahti and Hakulinen’s screenplay falls into a trap of over-generalizing that what teenage boys want from sex is for their own appetites to be satiated and nothing else, whereas teenage girls wish to have a more sensual experience and are more concerned with mutual enjoyment. Whilst this may be, on some level, broadly accurate, the result is that the teenage male characters with whom Rönkkö endures uncomfortable assignations at parties feel like caricatures. The scenes featuring them contrast starkly with Mimmi and Emma’s sex scenes together, which depict their activities as infinitely more loving and mutually pleasurable. This is not to say that the screenplay for Girl Picture is entirely without merit, however; the dialogue is generally well-written and there is a very funny line about Moomin mugs.
Credit should also go to Haapasalo for vividly capturing the awkwardness of teenage parties, with a handjob scene directed in a particularly (and necessarily) cringe-inducing fashion. The film offers several engaging little vignettes like this, but that is all they are, and Ahti and Hakulinen never seem to be all that interested in having them cohere into a compelling plot. The film suffers from a blunt script and the story simply peters out at the end, as opposed to coming to a genuine conclusion. Girl Picture has several enjoyable moments, but it ultimately proves to be too episodic, unstructured and overly reliant on generic tropes to have much of a dramatic impact.
Photo courtesy of Strand Releasing
The post Girl Picture appeared first on Spectrum Culture.