That’s it. We should pack our bags for Finland now.

But only if we can live within the intimate mix of warm interiors and pale, naturally lit exteriors of Producing Adults, Finnish director Aleksi Salmenperä’s first feature, which gives us the sense that the cold outside in no way freezes the lives of its quirky characters. Lest we scour the internet for the cheapest flights and stuff our woolly scarves into our carryons in too much haste, we should also make sure that the very healthy attitude this film exhibits about sexuality is the norm in Finland. Well, that and that queer Finnish ladies are even one-fifth as lovely and tenderly emotive as the two female leads of Producing Adults.

Don’t get me wrong—Producing Adults (Lapsia Ja Aikuisia) isn’t exactly a Scandinavian dyke-utopic love fest with good lighting. There’s a guy running interference throughout most of the film. Not only that, he so uncannily looks like a Euro version of The L Word’s Tim that we keep thinking oceanic-eyed, serious-face-making Antero (Kari-Pekka Toivonen) is really a swim coach, not an Olympic speed skater after all. He even puts on his button-up shirts the same way. Only Antero’s not so damn good as Tim, and thus a lot more believable.

Antero’s good side? He plants basil and lemon basil on the balcony. His bad? He poisons his fiancée (and girlfriend of 15 years) Venla (Minna Haapkylä) into a miscarriage. Antero just doesn’t want to have kids—so much so that he allows a strangely nonchalant doctor to sterilize him. This way he can fake giving it a shot with Venla, whom he does love, despite all of his masculinist jock selfishness and deceitfulness.

Venla, a family therapist who works at a local fertility clinic and counsels couples trying to get pregnant, doesn’t want to put off having her own kid. Befriending the clinic’s bisexual doctor Satu (Minttu Mustakallio) when they get locked into the lab with tubes of sperm together, Venla soon plots a turkey-baster-esque plan which goes awry.

Next thing you know, lingering eye contact combined with that looking away, looking back again trick that two women together have perfected (sorry, guys!) starts happening, even while Venla and Satu are out doing something non-sexy like bowling. We know where the plot heads from here! I won’t give away the tangles. But I will say that the cutest thing about the main love scene in Producing Adults, other than its beginning with some footsies over tea, is that for an extended moment Satu can’t, for the life of her, get her shirt off over her head.

Also, perhaps the most stellar line in any film in any language this year happens here (do we have the translator to thank?): “It stinks in here. It smells like a kebab.” Watch for it. You’ll laugh hard too.

But more importantly, Producing Adults is careful not to be too heavy-handed with its lesbian love story. What’s too heavy-handed? you ask. Are not all lesbian love stories as delightful as chocolate mousse pie with graham-crackery crust when you least expect it?

I just mean that Producing Adults is not your typical coming-out story. Bells don’t ring in the background, the sun doesn’t suddenly shine brighter, Mariel Hemingway doesn’t suddenly start to eat. Nothing that cheesy. First of all, Satu is shown as fully comfortable with where she registers midway up on the Kinsey scale. She’ll sleep with a guy if she’s really, really bored, or if he gives her a nectarine and calls it a magic apple, but for the most part, she leans towards the chicks. Even Satu’s mom knows she’s queer and accordingly, lovingly slobbers kisses all over Venla from her cancer ward hospital bed like she would a daughter-in-law.

When presumably straight Venla starts to fall for Satu, it’s subtle, curious, delicious. A magnet doesn’t suddenly move over on a sexual identity chart. Proclamations are not shouted in the city square. It just is. Venla quite simply falls in love. While we all adore a good coming out story—they are heartwarming to watch, like teen films where we watch our underdog heroine conquer the high school locker rooms again and again against all odds—sometimes it’s nice to see a more realistic look at romance in all of its heartbreaking complexity. Producing Adults provides us that. It is adult, mature, difficult, but not without giggles.

Perhaps before traveling en masse to Finland, we should first jet Hollywood’s wait staff over to study at The Theatre Academy of Finland—since all three of this film’s leads went there, and frankly, they were all just slightly less than phenomenal. Salmenperä proves to be a very gestural filmmaker who knows how to use actors. Little details, like Venla holding up some Kleenex for Antero in the car, betray a lot; and when the feeling comes pouring out, like when Venla is talking and crying in a therapy session, we don’t hear anything she’s saying, we hear the soundtrack turned up.

We don’t need to hear—her face offers us everything we need to know. For a male director making a lesbian film, Salmenperä did just fine.

Get Producing Adults on DVD