VoiLevi

The film tells the story of two 16-year old (?) girls in today's Finland. One of them - Emma, played by Saila Laakkonen - is a sexually active party girl from a broken home. Her love life is far from perfect so she starts to be emotionally quite unstable. The other girl is Minna - played absolutely brilliantly by Hennariikka Laaksola - whose life has almost perfect frames. Even so - or maybe therefore - she feels the need to suffer like her best friend. Her biggest problem is she's still a virgin (hence the name "The Last Virgin of Espoo") unlike most of her friends.

The girls decide to go hitchhiking to get some distance to their families and not-so-happy surroundings. However, Minna is mainly interested in finding someone she can sleep with. She's getting desperate and aggressively makes indecent proposals to all the men the girls encounter. Unfortunately, even her best friend seems to have lower priority in her mind...

I liked this movie very much. One of the reasons is that I have seen such behavior in my friends' life about ten years ago and the film captures the Finnish teenagers' life really well. That's also the reason why this movie is so touching. It shows how the teenagers (and children) in this country are trying to grow up and behave like adults years before they should do so. These youngsters get drunk, have sex and smoke pot - and the saddest thing is they actually feel a compelling need to do so. They simply have to have as much sexual experiences as their friends do and think that a sexually transmitting decease or a criminal record is something to be jealous of. Even the children from happy families feel the need to meet these unhealthy - or even sick - standards...

I liked Leppä's previous film "Pitkä kuuma kesä" but didn't find it as great as most young Finns seem to. So I didn't expect very much of this. Maybe that's why I was almost blown away and really laughed a lot during this flick.

The characters are quite rough stereotypes but the actors do a great (or at least decent) job portraying them thus making them painfully disgusting or funny. Especially Amanda Pilke's performance as young Saara really hits the spot. What disturbs a bit is that sometimes people start laughing in the middle of their lines. I really believe that is intentional and not just poor acting. However, it sometimes makes you feel as if the actors are making up their lines as they speak and thus have a hard time showing a serious face. This disturbs especially with Unto Helo, whose acting in "Pitkä kuuma kesä" wasn't really my favorite performance either.

I think the funny bits are mostly in the dialogue, so non-Finns might not find this nearly as funny as I did. I also guess you get the most of this if you're under thirty years old (at least mentally :) ) because most of the

action involves young guys messing around and boozing. Still, there's also a plot so this is not just a Jackass episode.