Like his previous movie, Frozen Land ("Paha maa"), Aku Louhimies's Vuosaari is a film with a large cast and several parallel story lines, which he tries to tie together with an unifying theme. Like with Frozen Land, Louhimies pretty much fails in that task. In Frozen Land the grand theme seemed to be "bad things happen to people", whereas in this one it's even more vague, namely "love". Other than that, the only factor uniting the stories is the suburb of Vuosaari in Helsinki, but even this is mainly used as a mere backdrop. Real-life Vuosaari is a largely working-class area with a big immigrant population, and while Louhimies does shortly address the situation of immigrants in a few scenes, the movie doesn't really have any grand societal vision. Like Frozen Land, Vuosaari is mostly concerned with personal issues, not social ones. These same stories could have taken place in pretty much any suburb of Helsinki, or any other First World city.
For all his flaws Louhimies is still a masterful storyteller, able to distill most of his subplots into short, elegant scenes that are full emotion yet rarely syrupy. A few of the individual story lines in Vuosaari are very good in themselves. A subplot involving a single father concerned about his son and his weight, as well as another one dealing with a family man cheating his wife with their Estonian cleaner, offer an effective mixture of drama and comedy. A third subplot about with a kid who gets bullied in school, partly because of his Eastern European roots, is done with such empathy that it's almost impossible not to cry. However, the climax of this story again proves why Louhimies's lack of a wider focus is problematic. Racism/xenophobia and bullying are social problems, yet Vuosaari's solution to them is oh-so-individualist: the all-conquering love.
Some of the other subplots in Vuosaari feel much more out of place. The American actor Sean Pertwee seems to have been cast only to provide the opening narration with his deep, gravelly voice. Pertwee's actual scenes are few, and they could've easily been cut without the movie suffering a bit. Another subplot involves a kid with a negligent single mother, whose only friend is his dog. This story has no proper solution or catharsis, and it appears to be in the movie only to function as a maximum tear-jerker. Who wouldn't be touched by an emotionally abused kid and his loving dog? Another tear-jerker is the story of a single mother suffering from cancer, and of her small daughter's reaction to her illness. While this subplot is genuinely touching for the most part, as it's about to reach its climax, Louhimies for some reason decides to add a scene that intentionally misleads the viewers in order to extract a few more tears from them. Personally I find this kind of cinematic cheating pointless and cheap.
It's also worth noting that while Louhimies tries to understand and empathize with each of the male protagonists in Vuosaari, the same does not apply to all the women in it. Three of the female protagonists (the wife of the cheating husband, the young woman who's constantly high, the mother who neglects his son) are depicted as rather awful people, with little attempt to explain why they are that way. This is particularly evident in the cheater subplot. The cheating husband is portrayed as a sympathetic character, and his affair with the Estonian woman is justified by his wife being cold and bitchy, but we never really get to see her side of the story. What made her so cold and bitchy?
All in all, Vuosaari might have been a good movie if Louhimies had left out the weaker subplots, expanded on the remaining ones, and tried to make their thematic connections stronger. As such, the film is merely a collection of short stories, some better than others, but definitely less than the sum of its parts.
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