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Zaida Bergroth: Tove (2020) starring Alma Pöysti (Tove Jansson).
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Zaida Bergroth: Tove (1920) starring Alma Pöysti (Tove Jansson). Photo: Tommi Hynynen / Helsinki-filmi.
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Signe Hammarsten-Jansson (1882–1970) with her daughter Tove Jansson. Photo © Tove Jansson’s estate. From: Moomin.com.
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| Viktor Jansson (1886–1958): A Girl's Head [Tove Jansson (1914–2001], 1920, marble, 32 cm. Private collection. Photo: Valtion taidemuseo / Kuvataiteen keskusarkisto / Kokoelma Viktor Jansson. I discovered this bust at Retretti, 2011, at the Artist Couples retrospective curated by Riitta Konttinen. Included were both the couple Signe Hammarsten-Jansson & Viktor Jansson and Tove Jansson & Tuulikki Pietilä. I haven't seen this bust since Retretti. It features prominently in the motion picture Tove. |
FI/SE © 2020 Helsinki-filmi / Anagram Sverige. P: Andrea Reuter, Aleksi Bardy.
D: Zaida Bergroth. SC: Eeva Putro – from a story by Eeva Putro, Jarno Elonen. DP: Linda Wassberg – shot on super 16 – released on digital. PD: Catharina Nyqvist Ehrnrooth. AD: Tony Alfström, Christer Hongisto, Juha-Matti Toppinen. Lighting design: Micke Nyström. Cost: Eugen Tamberg. Makeup: Riikka Virtanen. SFX: KFX Finland. VFX (Paris): Antoine Simkine. VFX (Post Control): Tuomo Hintikka. M: Matti Bye. S: Micke Nyström. ED: Samu Heikkilä. Intimacy coordinator: Pia Rickman.
C: Alma Pöysti (Tove Jansson), Krista Kosonen (Vivica Bandler), Shanti Roney (Atos Wirtanen), Joanna Haarti (Tuulikki Pietilä), Kajsa Ernst (Signe "Ham" Jansson), Robert Enckell (Viktor "Faffan" Jansson), Jakob Öhrman (Sam Vanni), Eeva Putro (Maya Vanni / London).
With: Wilhelm Enckell (Lars "Lasse" Jansson), Liisi Tandefelt (landlady), Emma Klingenberg (Maj-Lis Wirtanen), Juhana Ryynänen (Bruno Frank, Maj-Lis's lover), Henrik Wolff (chairman of the grant committee), Dick Idman (Erik von Frenckell), Simon Häger (Kurt Bandler), Saga Sarkola (actor at Studentteatern), Lidia Taavitsainen (Irja Koskinen), Paavo Järvenpää (Göran Schildt), Oskar Pöysti (Snusmumriken / Snufkin), Iida Kuningas (Tofslan / Thingumy), Heli Hyttinen (Vifslan), Fabian Silén (Rådd-djuret / The Muddler), Willehard Korander (Mumintrollet / Moomintroll), Andrea Reuter (journalist), Jonathan Hutchins (Sutton, editor of Evening News), Sara Soulié (Coco).
Finale: 8 mm home movie footage on Tove Jansson shot by Tuulikki Pietilä.
In Swedish and some French, English and Finnish.
116 min
Festival premiere: 9 Sep 2020 Toronto International Film Festival.
Premiere: 2 Oct 2020, distributed by Oy Nordisk Film Ab with Finnish / Swedish subtitles by Janne Kauppila / Heidi Nyblom Kuorikoski.
International sales: LevelK.
Viewed at Tennispalatsi isense with Dolby Atmos, Helsinki, 2 Oct 2020.
AA: There has been a gross neglect of great women in Finnish biopics, and it is welcome and long overdue that the situation is now being straightened with high profile movies such as
Helene (on Helene Schjerfbeck),
Aalto (giving equal credit to Aino and Alvar Aalto) and Tove. A vast source of great drama could also be found for example in the stories of the world's first female members of parliament, the heroic 19 who were elected in 1907 in Finland.
Cinema was important for Tove Jansson (1914–2001) who was a film buff, a Francophile and a Rive Gauche habituée. She had even been conceived in Paris. As an art student in the mid-1930s she was a regular at the
Filmistudio Projektio film society together with her then boyfriend Sam Vanni, later a pioneer of Finnish abstract art. There they were able to absorb films by Léger, Cocteau, Buñuel, Dalí, et al.
The world knows Tove Jansson as the creator of the
Moomin characters, but the daughter of an artist family was versatile during a professional career that spanned from 1928 until 1998. She was a painter of still lifes, landscapes, portraits, murals, altarpieces, glass paintings, surrealist visions and abstractions, a drawer, a caricaturist, a cartoonist, a comic strip artist, an illustrator, an author of picture books, short stories, novels, memoirs, travel stories, stage plays, opera librettoes, poems and songs. She designed book cover art, postcards, invitations, posters and advertisements. She also loved music: she sang, played instruments, danced and wrote some of the best-loved lyrics of Finland such as "Höstvisa" ["The Autumn Song"] composed by
Erna Tauro. In 1929–1944 Jansson was also a contributor of 600 caricatures to the Garm magazine dedicated to political satire, lambasting both Hitler and Stalin.
The range of Jansson's achievements has been covered in outstanding biographies such as Boel Westin's Tove Jansson – ord, bild och liv (2007) and Tuula Karjalainen's Tove Jansson: tee työtä ja rakasta (2013). In an exhibition her many sides were on full display for the first time during her
centenary in 2014 at the Finnish National Gallery at Ateneum. We learned that she was a complete professional and early on one of the family breadwinners. Her father Viktor Jansson, one of Finland's finest sculptors, was being left in the shadow of Wäinö Aaltonen. Her mother Signe Hammarsten-Jansson became the main breadwinner because of her office at the State Bank-Note Printery, where she designed for instance postage stamps. She is still one of the most remarkable graphic artists in the history of Finland.
For Tove Jansson, life, love and work belonged together: her life was a combination of a hard work ethos and a Bohemian party abandon. The director Zaida Bergroth has home field advantage in creating a film about an artist family; her mother is Marjatta Tapiola, one of Finland most highly regarded painters. The ambience in the artists' home ateliers and theatre rehearsals seems genuine and lived in. The mise-en-scène, the cinematography (by Linda Wassberg), the production design (by Catharina Nyqvist Ehrnrooth) and the lighting (by Micke Nyström), are sensitively creative. We breathe the air and share the sunlight of Tove Jansson in the heart of Helsinki (
her atelier, now a private museum, is on Ullanlinnankatu 1), in Paris and by the sea. The production values are high, the budget was one of the biggest in Finnish cinema, and it is all up there on the screen.
A film like this stands or falls by the performance of the leading actress. Alma Pöysti has a distinguished theatre career in Helsinki, Stockholm, Uppsala and Göteborg. She has many supporting film roles and television work under her belt, and in Tove she debuts in a leading role in a theatrical film. She succeeds wonderfully. Tove Jansson would love Pöysti's vivid and irreverent interpretation. She is like quicksilver, but there is always a core of confidence. Tove Jansson appears both as a Bohemian and a shrewd businesswoman, taught to perseverance since the Great Depression.
Also Alma Pöysti has home field advantage. Her grandfather Lasse Pöysti and grandmother Birgitta Ulfsson played the Moomin Troll and the Moomin Mamma during many decades, also in the first (1969) television series based on Tove Jansson's fairytales. The series was written by Tove and Lars Jansson, directed by Vivica Bandler and Ulla Berglund, and the many popular songs were composed by Erna Tauro. Bandler had given Pöysti the biggest opportunity of his life by engaging him in 1955 into her Lilla Teatern.
On screen, Alma Pöysti is now delivering something more substantial than before. There is depth and complexity, but also wild anarchy, conveyed with subtle gestures and unobtrusive eye movements. The art of the close-up is something in which Zaida Bergroth excels. If Ingmar Bergman were alive, he would relish this wonderful and original performance. He might also enjoy the delightful "play in the play" sequences: staging Sartre's La Putain respectueuse / Den respektfulla skökan in Helsinki in 1948 at the Swedish Theatre – and the first Tove Jansson dramatization, Mumintrollet och kometen / Comet in Moominland in 1949.
Krista Kosonen, a great presence on the Finnish stage, screen and television, has been expanding her scope in playing a show dancer (in Zaida Bergroth's
Miami), a dominatrix (in
Dogs Wear No Pants) and now Vivica Bandler (1917–2004), a grande dame of the Finnish theatre, a great avantgardist and an open-minded director, manager and mentor of young talent. She was also an irrepressible bisexual, and she woke up Tove Jansson to love between women. Homosexuality was criminalized in Finland until 1971 and classified as an illness until 1981, and only exceptional people carried on openly. Krista Kosonen interprets the role with great willpower and stamina, but at times there is a slight feeling of cruising on autopilot.
The forbidden love between women finds an expression in a secret language that also inspires Tove Jansson's Moomin tales. There is something vampiric in Vivica Bandler that Tove finds offputting, but they carry on until Tove finds the love of her life in the fellow artist Tuulikki Pietilä (1917–2009).
Also in her previous film,
Maria's Paradise, Bergroth presented a study of a "vampiric" woman (the charismatic preacher Maria Åkerblom played by Pihla Viitala) and nice, malleable women caught in her circle (Salome played by Satu Tuuli Karhu and Malin interpreted by Saga Sarkola). Even Miami was based on the fatal attraction of a central woman: Angela (Kosonen) is at first naively admired by her little sister Anna (Sonja Kuittinen), but it is Anna who turns out to be the more ruthless criminal.
Kosonen had an important role also in Helene, as Schjerfbeck's best friend
Helena Westermarck, a memorable study of friendship between women. Kosonen seems to need no effort to portray a character with a big heart, but asked to explore the dark side her performance remains studied.
Martina Moliis-Mellberg in her review in Finland's leading Swedish newspaper Hufvudstadsbladet pays attention to the many accents in the movie. Swedish is the main language of almost all protagonists. We hear Swedish as the first language of a Finn (Alma Pöysti), Swedish Swedish (Shanti Roney) and Swedish as the second language of a Finn (Krista Kosonen). In the cinema, such things happen all the time, and one gets used to it. I think it's most important to find the best actor for the part. It takes a Visconti to achieve a dubbing that is superior to the actor's own voice. Certainly it is Krista Kosonen who is under the greatest pressure language-wise.
Tove is the first feature film screenplay credit by Eeva Putro, a bright and original presence as an actress since 13 years, also a director of a short film of talent,
Rakastuneita naisia / Women in Love (2014). She gives also a wonderful performance as Maya Vanni, the wife of Sam Vanni, both Tove's lifelong friends. In Tove's centenary exhibition I was startled to discover a portrait of Maya painted in Paul Gauguin's Tahiti style. I happened to know Maya Vanni in her last years in Helsinki before she moved to Jerusalem, and I felt a pleasant familiarity in Eeva Putro's interpretation. The Jewish dimension in the Vanni connection was significant for Tove, an outspoken and early anti-Fascist. In Hollywood she would have been called "a premature anti-Fascist". Let's notice here also that Erna Tauro belonged to a distinguished Jewish musical family.
Tove is the first film in which I pay attention to the presence of an
"intimacy coordinator" in the credits. I don't think it is her fault,
but there is such a feeling of embarrassment in the intimate scenes that
I would prefer the film without them. They don't ring true, and they are
not necessary. Ernst Lubitsch and Mae West were able to convey
everything without showing anything. Intimate scenes were more affecting in Maria's Paradise and Women in Love.
Among the delicious performances is also Liisi Tandefelt's as the long-suffering landlady of Tove Jansson, the struggling Bohemian, always behind in the rent. The landlady's walls are already covered with Tove's paintings. Then comes the editor of the Evening News, the biggest newspaper of the world in the 1950s. The Moomin comics are bought for global syndication, and Tove's days of financial hardship are over. "I hope you have not done anything illegal" says the landlady upon receiving a huge wad of bills. "Only with my artistic integrity", replies Tove.
The most important decision in the screenplay was limiting the time-frame to the years 1944–1956, the period of Tove Jansson's international breakthrough and her personal development to same-sex love. The film begins during the last days of Finland's war against the Soviet Union in 1944. The people of Helsinki are hiding in bomb shelters. The genesis of the Moomin world had taken place during Finland's Winter War in 1939–1940, but the full blossoming happened only after WWII. While watching Nadezhda Kosheverova's
Zolushka / Cinderella (1947) in Bologna a month ago I was thinking that there was an exceptional demand for children's fiction during the post-war "baby boom". Undoubtedly this special atmosphere also contributed to the happy reception of Tove Jansson's Moomin world.
Men are marginal. Viktor Jansson participated in Finland's Civil War in 1918, also in the notoriously bloody Battle of Tampere. He was only 32 when he came back, but the horrors of the war marked the family for years to come. "This is no ordinary war", Viktor had written home in March 1918, "but far worse. There is no quarter". Viktor, the smiling, handsome artist with a glimpse in his eye, was a changed man, withdrawn, gloomy, almost never laughing. In the film, he never gives Tove credit. After Viktor's death, there is a deeply moving sequence in which Tove receives the bust he sculpted of her as a child (see above) and a big folder of carefully cultivated clippings of her entire career.
Tove's last male lover Atos Wirtanen (1906–1979), the socialist intellectual, writer and pacifist, is portrayed mainly as an indecisive drifter, trapped in triangle circumstances. It is difficult for a male viewer to relate to male characters in Tove. Perhaps this is how female viewers experience films all the time.
Before the end credits there is a brief glimpse of Tove's home movies and a sample of her own expressive voice.
BEYOND THE JUMP BREAK: DATA FROM THE PRESS KIT:
