Story
Jukka is a 13-year old who lives with his mum. He’s really into photography and one night he secretly makes nude pictures of an older girl, Johanna, who lives in the building in front of his own. While taking pictures he sees that the girl gets harassed by a man, her stepfather, and Jukka calls the fire brigade, sends them over to her apartment and thus saves her. Later on Johanna finds out that Jukka has taken pictures of her and gets angry with him.

Jukka can’t forget about her, asks his art teacher, an elder gay man, to teach him to make better pictures and convinces Johanna  into a photo session. They become friends and Johanna promises Jukko to be his date at a school party, the day he turns 14, when she makes it as a model and gets famous. At the same time Jukko gets befriended with his art teacher as well.

Johanna enters into a beauty contest for Miss Young Face and wins, loses track of Jukko and enters into a new world. Jukko’s art teacher dies of AIDS and Jukko loses all that was important to him. Then he turns 14......... Will Johanna show up and keep her promise?

Comments
Young Love is very interesting and certainly keeps up the good name of Scandinavian movies. The plot is simple but original. The (ordinary) friendship between Jukko and his art teacher is shown in a nice and modest way. Joonas Nordman as Jukko is cute and does a nice job. You’ll like his character from the start. A nice coming of age movie well worth watching.

DVD R2
Two deleted scenes, a video clip, trailer and “The Making of....”. And English subtitles! Worth buying also for those whose Finnish is a bit rusty.

Links
DVD R2 can be bought at (You need to Login or Register to view media files and links) Website is in Finnish, but ordering procedures are easy to follow. Be careful: after submitting credit card data some Finnish text comes up, but no confirmative email. Don’t get fooled (like me) and don’t think something went wrong: just wait for the order to be delivered (or try again and get a second copy)......

‘soles’

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