18-year-old Taavi, who never goes anywhere without his video camera, and his young and wealthy friends find themselves on the cusp of adulthood. After throwing a wild party at the mansion left to him by his deceased parents, Taavi shoots video of the party-goers in their various states of undress and drunken sexual congress. What begins as a prank spurs Taavi and his friends Jere, Sami, and Markus to form a club, the only requirement for admission being that each young man must bring a tape of his latest sexual conquest to every club meeting. This risqué game quickly degenerates into dangerous compulsion as relationships implode and the boys forsake their girlfriends in favor of prostitutes and "swingers". As currents of coercion and abuse enter the picture, each young man must ultimately confront his own morality in the viewfinder.

Young Gods is the ironically-titled film that examines the vapid world of mesmerizing images we live in. We experience this confusion through the eyes (and lenses) of four Finnish boys, all recent high-school graduates. Taavi has just inherited his deceased father’s mansion and wealth, but has blocked out the memory of his death, and moves through life at a distance, viewing everything possible through his camcorder’s viewfinder. Jere is emotionally dead. He has a girlfriend and finds comfort in sex, but is unable to open his heart. Sami, homely and overweight, has zero self-esteem. Markus is extremely immature, but otherwise well-intentioned.

The four make an odd pact to film their sexual conquests, and the four find themselves living in an even more illusory meta-world, as their desire to film sex takes precedence over their actual desires, and recording an event becomes secondary to experiencing life.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 8th, 2008 at 12:00 and is filed under Cinema, Media, Movies, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.