Monthly Archives: March 2021

  • Tove

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Zaida Bergroth (2020)

    Zaida Bergroth’s biographical film covers around a decade in the eighty-six-year life of her fellow Finn, the writer, artist, and illustrator, Tove Jansson (1914-2001).  Focusing on a short part of a life is currently conventional in biopic.  It means, most obviously, that the actor playing the biographee doesn’t have to age many decades.  It can also imply that the period covered is sufficient to convey the subject’s essential qualities.  I don’t know if Bergroth and the scriptwriter, Eeva Putro, think that’s the case here but their timeframe short-changes Tove Jansson and Alma Pöysti, who plays her.  There’s more to them both than Tove is prepared to show.

    The film, streaming as part of BFI’s Flare/LGBTQI+ festival, begins in 1944 and ends somewhere in the 1950s.  This is the period in which Jansson became a famous name, internationally as the author of the Moomin books, in Finland as a comic-strip artist too.  (There’s some overlap between the two.  From the mid-fifties, Moomintroll was published as a daily strip in the London Evening News.  Tove includes a scene in which the heroine is astonished by the highly lucrative offer made her by the paper’s representative (Jonathan Hutchings).)  The main purpose of the chosen time span, however, is to concentrate on Tove’s unhappy affair with the theatre director, Vivica Bandler (Krista Kosonen).  Late on in the narrative, Tove meets Tuulikki Pietilä, the graphic artist with whom she shared the rest (and more than half) of her life.  Bergroth and Putro aren’t interested in this remarkably enduring partnership.  Even summary text at the end majors on Tove and Vivica.  We’re told not only that they always stayed friends but that Vivica, in later years, regretted not being able to return Tove’s love. 

    The film-makers may have deemed Jansson’s settled life with Pietilä too unexciting for their purposes – but her attachment to Bandler, on Tove‘s account, wasn’t long on drama either.  Once the initial seduction, of Tove by Vivica, has taken place and we get the message that Vivica, unlike Tove, is promiscuous, the relationship is predictable and repetitive – without developing substance through repetition.  Its static quality is reinforced by Krista Kosonen’s Vivica – Kosonen has a gravid allure but her expressions change rarely and, when they do change, slowly.  That’s not at all the case with the excellent Alma Pöysti.  She’s always emotionally alert and eloquent in Tove’s human interactions and shows her mind working as she draws, and appraises what she’s drawn.  It’s frustrating, though, that Pöysti is obliged to be mutely melancholy much of the time.  Bergroth’s camera occasionally scans pages of Moomin drawings but this hardly does justice to Tove Jansson’s vigorous, sustained creativity.  Anyone coming to the film without prior knowledge of her is liable to get the impression she was too depressed to get much work done.

    Joanna Haartti’s Tuulikki is on screen for only a few minutes but she’s a bracing presence from the moment she appears.  Haartti suggests a personality – positive, straightforward, intellectually inquisitive – in a few incisive strokes.  In the film’s last scene, she visits Tove’s studio:  just the way that Haartti hands Tove the bag of pastries she’s brought is expressive.  I was left wishing that Bergroth and Eeva Putro had chosen a different structure and emphasis, describing more of the early stages of Tove’s life with Tuulikki, perhaps using flashbacks to her time with Vivica by way of contrast.  The inertness of the central romance and the late arrival of Tuulikki on the scene have the effect of deflecting interest to Tove’s relationships with men – her father (Robert Enckell) and Atos Wirtanen (Shani Roney), a political philosopher and member of the Finnish parliament.

    Shani Roney’s Wirtanen is a clever, sensitive but faintly ridiculous fellow.  Despite his public and cultural standing, there’s a persistent diffidence about him in Helsinki’s bohemian circles, where he gets to know Tove.  They’re lovers for a time; at one point, she invites him to propose marriage to her.  Atos is amazed but happy to do so, and Tove accepts.  I couldn’t, though, believe his reaction to her subsequent admission that their living together is never going to work:  he already knows her sexual preferences – hence his astonishment when she asks him to propose.  (We’re told at the end that Atos like Vivica, continued to be friends with Tove.)   Viktor Jansson was a successful sculptor whose style was decidedly traditional.  The film’s presentation of his chilly discouragement of Tove’s artistic efforts is a bit overworked but Alma Pöysti has one of her most powerful moments in the aftermath to her father’s death.  Her mother (Kajsa Ernst) hands Tove a scrapbook that Viktor kept scrupulously up to date – full of press cuttings that chart his daughter’s increasing success and reputation.  Seeing this, Tove is convulsed in silent grief – she never suspected her father took pride in her.  Pöysti shows in her face and attitude that the suddenly abundant evidence he did now makes things worse, as well as better.

    I read Moomin books as a child and, many years later, some of Jansson’s fiction for adults.  I was interested enough to watch Moominland Tales: The Life of Tove Jansson on BBC television in 2012; and impressed enough by it to make a CD copy.  Disappointed in Bergroth’s film, I looked out the CD and enjoyed this documentary all over again.  The voiceovers are exemplary (main narration by Samuel West, Tove Jansson’s words spoken by Janet Suzman); the talking heads are admirably well chosen.  It’s only to be expected that the BBC film, directed by Eleanor Yule, is more factually informative than Tove, not least in explaining the links between the most important people in Jansson’s life and the characters in her fiction.  But Moominland Tales is more dramatically involving too – thanks especially to still photographs, and home movies featuring Tove and Tuulikki, mostly on Klovharu, the small island in the Finnish Gulf where they built a home and, for many years, spent their summers.  There are extraordinary images of sea and sunlight both in the home-movie snippets and in Yule’s location filming on the island.

    According to Wikipedia, Tove, with a budget of 3.4m euros, is the second most expensive picture ever made in Finland.  Shot by Linda Wassberg and designed by Catharina Nyqvist Ehrnrooth, it’s a good-looking piece, and boasts some fine acting.  It’s hard and dreary work, though.  During the closing credits, Bergroth plays video footage of the elderly Tove doing an ecstatic little dance (Eleanor Yule’s documentary uses the same piece of film).  Two or three times in the course of Tove, Alma Pöysti dances similarly, to the accompaniment of Benny Goodman or Glenn Miller music, but these bursts of energetic joie de vivre are highly untypical of the film.  In the last scene, Tove shows Tuulikki the picture she’s currently painting – a self-portrait, of a woman whose face is featureless.  The painting, Tove tells Tuulikki, is called ‘The Beginner’.  You get Zaida Bergroth’s point but wonder if she quite realises the aptness of that blank-canvas face or the irony in the painting’s name.  Tove ends just as things begin to get interesting.

    21 March 2021

  • My Donkey, My Lover & I

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Antoinette dans les Cévennes

    Caroline Vignal (2020)

    The donkey’s known as Patrick, the lover’s name is Vladimir and I is Antoinette Lapouge, a Paris primary school teacher.  She can’t wait for the school summer holidays to begin so that she can spend more time with Vladimir.  At an end-of-term concert, Antoinette (Laure Calamy), in a low-cut, close-fitting, shiny silver gown, leads her Year 5 class in a rendition of Véronique Sanson’s ‘Amoureuse’.  The song choice and Mme Lapouge’s get-up are understandably disconcerting to some of the parents watching.  Among them is Vladimir (Benjamin Lavernhe), whose daughter Alice (Louise Vidal) is one of Antoinette’s pupils.  Rather than raising his eyebrows, he smiles a tad nervously and gives a wave of encouragement in the direction of Alice or her teacher or both.  Antoinette belts out, ‘When I’m away from him/I’ve lost my mind a little …’ and Vladimir knows who she means.  After the concert and a clandestine snog, he announces he won’t be available as soon as Antoinette had hoped.  Vladimir is off to the Cévennes with Alice and his wife.  They’ll follow the ‘Stevenson trail’, the route taken by Robert Louis Stevenson and recorded in his Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes.  The distraught, impulsive Antoinette heads there too, in pursuit.  A very few screen minutes later, she’s being invited to choose a donkey for the mountain trek.  She makes her selection and is told ‘good choice’ by a local.  He’s joking.  Patrick is notorious for refusing to budge.

    On the face of it, My Donkey, My Lover & I is a barmy concoction of broad comedy, tourist commercial and character study.  The writer-director Caroline Vignal has made only one cinema feature before and that was twenty years ago (Girlfriends).   It seems long odds against the film working yet it does, not just in each one of its travelogue, comic and more serious aspects but, increasingly, as a whole.  Simon Beaufils’ cinematography may well help boost holiday bookings in the Cévennes but the glorious landscape is context.  The film doesn’t luxuriate in it:  Vignal’s characters are usually too preoccupied with their own affairs to savour the surroundings.  When Antoinette arrives at the inn where she’ll spend her first night there’s no sign of Vladimir and his family.  At the communal supper table, she blurts out to inquisitive fellow guests the reason for her visit and admits she’s utterly inexperienced in this kind of holiday.  That sows the seeds of a fame that spreads along the Stevenson trail in the days ahead:  by the time Antoinette reaches her later destinations, her reputation, embellished by the various indignities she suffers en route, precedes her.  Some of the farcical incidents are funnier than others but, as they accumulate, they add to the central character’s substance and, sometimes, pathos.  The mixture of humour and pain involved – especially during Antoinette’s eventual encounter with Vladimir and his family – is surprisingly rich.

    Caroline Vignal’s screenplay is a smart piece of work.  The episodic structure dovetails with the heroine’s journey – six daily stages, staying overnight at different inns and gîtes.  Travelling twenty or so kilometres a day chimes with Antoinette’s covering a distance of emotional ground but so does, on one leg of the expedition, her going round in a circle and ending where she started.  She finds that Patrick is more likely to move if she keeps talking to him so she does:  it’s a neat way of telling the viewer more about her, including her perennial habit of choosing the wrong man to get involved with.  When he finally sees Vladimir, Patrick lets out a prolonged, alarming bray – an inventive, admonitory variation on ‘I’ve heard so much about you’.  It’s right that the donkey takes precedence over the man in the order of the English title.  The romcom convention of the couple-to-be at first loathing then warming to each other applies here to Antoinette and Patrick rather than Antoinette and Vladimir.  The latter isn’t presented as a villain; when he and Antoinette have sex under the stars he is – as Antoinette tells Patrick next day – tenderly loving.  Vladimir seems feeble, though, in the company of his apparently formidable wife Eléonore (Olivia Côte).  As she and Antoinette walk side by side, with Vladimir and Alice a little way ahead, Eléonore explains that she realises what her husband’s up to, and that he’s done it plenty of times before.  Antoinette is left feeling guilty and hurt – that’s even before Patrick suddenly takes off and drags her along the ground for a hundred yards.  Soon after, Vladimir, along with his wife and daughter, disappears from the film.

    The performances in all three title roles are very successful but My Donkey, My Lover & I comes off thanks to Laure Calamy, perhaps best known as one of the regulars in the international hit TV series Dix pour cent, aka Call My Agent!  She was good in her supporting role in a very different animal-related film, Dominik Moll’s Seules les bêtes (2019), though without standing out in a strong cast.  Vignal’s movie offers Calamy close to a one-woman show – she seizes the opportunity and shoulders the responsibility with aplomb.   Her histrionic verve, which seems excessive at the start (and so threatens to get tiresome), proves to be crucial.  This OTT quality, as well as sustaining the film’s otherwise fragile energy level, expresses the anxiety – and anxiety to please – behind her character’s bubbly affability.  From the start, she makes Antoinette so exuberantly clueless that it’s hard to resent her as a would-be marriage wrecker.  Calamy’s realistic acting is just as good, notably when Antoinette has no option but to listen, excruciatingly embarrassed, to Eléonore’s monologue.  My Donkey, My Lover & I was a surprise critical and commercial success in France last year.   Earlier this month, Laure Calamy won the César for Best Actress for her work in the film – an accolade that suggests César voters, despite the bad press the organisation has received in the last year or two, may be more broad-minded and good-humoured than their BAFTA counterparts have become.

    Lying in her dormitory bunk bed – standard sleeping accommodation for her during the trip – Antoinette reads her copy of Travels with a Donkey.  She’s already learned from Idriss (Denis Mpunga), one of her auberge hosts, that Stevenson undertook his Cévennes journey during the most difficult stage of what proved to be his lifelong partnership with Fanny Osbourne.  Now she notes Stevenson’s observation that ‘We are all travellers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend’.  Patrick is too wily an individual to meet that description but Antoinette is genuinely grateful to him at the end of their six days together.  When she learns he’s already on his next assignment she runs, despite a sprained ankle, to find him (another romcom trope).  The idea is to say goodbye but Patrick’s new partner, whose name is Romain (Matthieu Sampeur), invites Antoinette to walk further with them.  That’s what she does and how the film ends.  Romain is probably the next mistake in her life but incurable romantic Antoinette can always hope.

    19 March 2021

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