Tove

The streets of Helsin­ki lay in ruins in the after­math of World War Two. A woman dances on her own, then, a bomb shel­ter, and she sketch­es bal­loon-head­ed graphite troll crea­tures on scrap paper. Tove Jans­son (Alma Pöysti) is at the heart of her best-known work, the com­ic series about a vil­lage of crea­tures called Moomintrolls.

Instead of trac­ing her life with her paint­ings as mere­ly an inci­dence, Finnish film­mak­er Zai­da Bergroth uses scenes from Jansson’s life to flesh out her sto­ry and the char­ac­ters she cre­at­ed. She grows apa­thet­ic to the more for­mal flo­rals and por­traits she paints, and longs for a more play­ful artis­tic rebirth to reawak­en her spirit.

At a gallery she meets Vivi­ca (Krista Koso­nen), and the pair share a dance on the porch at a sub­se­quent win­ter gath­er­ing. They begin a romance that’s more con­cerned with the rev­e­la­tions it brings than a hope for a myth­i­cal eter­nal love. The joy of their nights spent togeth­er, cig­a­rettes shared in bed and laugh­ter dur­ing inti­mate moments, strikes a bright con­trast with the bat­tle-scarred city they live in.

“Is this a key art­work defined by a con­scious choice, or did you allow the intrin­sic val­ue of art define the over­all nar­ra­tive?” is a ques­tion posed about halfway through the film, defin­ing its mis­sion as a por­trait of the artist. Vivi­ca is the first to show Tove the val­ue of these child­ish sketch­es, recog­nis­ing that their world doesn’t need anoth­er tra­di­tion­al painter. It is their romance that incites a shift to the play­ful style Jans­son is famous for.

Tove and Vivica’s love is a post-war joy bare­ly con­cealed beneath the pic­ture-per­fect sur­face of their mar­i­tal lives. With­in the local artists’ com­mu­ni­ty the two women attend par­ties, sur­round­ed by men in the arms of oth­er men, and women who ask each oth­er if they may lead as they dance. This should not feel as refresh­ing as it does, but see­ing gay romance depict­ed against some­thing oth­er than a white wall of het­ero­sex­u­al­i­ty, espe­cial­ly in a peri­od dra­ma, still feels all-too rare.

By show­ing how an artist infus­es their art from life, and their queer­ness, instead of act­ing as if their art flour­ish­es in spite of it, Tove is an anom­aly. Pro­vid­ing ori­gins for the inhab­i­tants of Moomin Val­ley, moments of pil­low talk between Tove and Vivi­ca spawn the char­ac­ters Tof­s­lan and Vif­s­lan; the script direct­ly traces where the artist exists with­in the art. Jansson’s word­play, which fea­tured out­side of the Moomins in some of her adult fic­tion work, twists words and phras­es inside out like a child learn­ing to spell, mim­ic­k­ing her young audi­ence to play with them.

We also meet Jansson’s lat­er life part­ner Tuu­lik­ki Pietilä (Joan­na Haart­ti), who would inspire the char­ac­ter of Too-Ticky. There’s an idea here that in our dreams every face is one that we’ve seen before. With moments pulled from Tove and Vivica’s let­ters (many of which are pub­lished in the col­lec­tion ​‘Let­ters From Tove’), the film strikes a ten­der bal­ance between its les­bian self-dis­cov­ery nar­ra­tive and Jansson’s artis­tic awak­en­ing, two things it under­stands can be deeply entwined.

Tove is in cin­e­mas 9 July via Blue Finch Film Releasing.