Dome Karukoski (2017)

‘Interestingly,’ writes Peter Bradshaw, in his Guardian review of the recently re-released Prick Up Your Ears, ‘this film doesn’t show Orton or Halliwell encountering homophobia as such’.  Bradshaw’s ‘interestingly’, with its implication of ‘surprisingly’, hints at a present-day perception of homosexuals of bygone years as predominantly victims – a unified group.  Prick Up Your Ears – all the more ‘interesting’ in that it was made during the AIDS crisis of the mid-1980s – isn’t a successful film but Stephen Frears and Alan Bennett did well not to show their protagonists on the receiving end of homophobia.  Joe Orton’s sexuality was hardly stifled by the laws, let alone the social and moral attitudes, of the time.  Kenneth Halliwell was into victimhood, but of a very particular kind.  In Dome Karukoski’s biography of the Finnish visual artist Touko Laaksonen (1920-91), the hero’s struggle is a more conventional account of a gay man’s difficult progress towards sexual and creative self-expression.  Tom of Finland, written by Alexsi Bardy, contains things that are improbable but next to nothing that’s surprising.  It isn’t very interesting in any sense of the word.

Touko Laaksonen was conscripted into the Finnish army in 1940, to fight alongside Nazi Germany.   Karukoski’s film begins in the later stages of World War II, from which Touko (Pekka Strang) returns a decorated officer, to live with his sister Kaija (Jessica Grabowsky) in Helsinki, where both work for an international advertising agency (McCann-Erickson).  In the army, Touko enjoys the company and uniforms of other soldiers and has furtive sex – in woodland, after dark – with a senior officer, Alijoki (Taisto Oksanen).  In peacetime, Touko cruises parkland under cover of darkness; on one occasion, a police patrol interrupts intercourse between him and a younger man.  Touko escapes but the other man, who has told Touko his name is ‘Nipa’, is beaten up.  During a trip to Berlin, Touko is arrested after a one-night stand that goes wrong and the German police call in a senior Finnish diplomat to interview him.  This turns out to be Alijoki, who initially claims they’ve never met before.  When Touko produces the cigarette case Alijoki gave him as a memento, as they parted company at the end of the war, the diplomat hurriedly pulls strings to arrange Touko’s release from custody.  Back in Helsinki, Kaija takes in a lodger – a young dancer called Veli (Lauri Tilkanen) – aka Nipa.  There’s no suggestion that Touko’s reunions with Alijoki and Nipa are anything but remarkable coincidences.  Taken together, they’re so unlikely that you wonder if they really must have happened.  On the other hand, they’re dramatically convenient enough to ring false.  They represent the choice of paths that lie before Touko.  Alijoki is the exemplar of contemporary covert homosexuality – a married man with an important career to protect.  Nipa becomes Touko’s life partner and, in due course, an early AIDS victim.

Dome Karukoski presents Touko’s late-1940s existence as a continuation of life during wartime.  He is haunted by bad dreams about the violence in which he participated as a soldier.  The outside world of Helsinki is a living nightmare – a dangerous place for a homosexual, whether in public toilets or parks or wherever else Touko goes in the hope of satisfying his sexual needs.  His refuge and means of sublimating his feelings comes in his homoerotic drawings.  After early post-war work that includes images of men in military uniform, he moves on to highly stylised male figures:  typically leather-clad or wearing skintight T-shirts and jeans, they’re often depicted, with bulging muscles and crotches, in uncompromising, exultant physical proximity.  In the mid-1950s Touko submits drawings, signed with the pseudonym Tom, to an American beefcake magazine whose editor publishes examples of the work and, in doing so, coins the ‘Tom of Finland’ credit.  The US censorship laws of the time initially restrict the range of publishable images.  By the 1970s, gay pornography is becoming more mainstream and Tom of Finland’s art increasingly popular – an emblem of the sexual revolution gathering force on the other side of the Atlantic.

That geographical qualification is needed because Tom of Finland doesn’t make clear how times are changing in Touko’s own country.  The preponderance of nighttime exterior sequences in Helsinki and the austere beauty of the landscape outside the city combine to make Karukoski’s Finland an expressive setting for love in a dark time – but you wouldn’t guess from the film that same-sex activity was decriminalised there in 1971.  Once Touko’s brushes with the law and the Alijoki episode are completed, Kaija Laaksonen is used, in effect, as the sole indicator of national public opinion.  Kaija continues to be more or less in denial of her brother’s sexuality, insisting that wider knowledge of it would bring shame upon their family.  The filmmakers ignore the possibility that, in her line of work, Kaija might have developed relatively permissive sexual attitudes – just as they ignore the possibility that she might, in view of the prejudices they’ve given her, have preconceived ideas about male dancers, especially ones who give off camp warning signals the way Nipa does.  Instead, she fancies him – to ramp up the tension between her and Touko.  Once her brother and Nipa are living together, however, Kaija is reduced to being an occasional caller and, whenever she turns up, a somewhat frustrated domestic drudge – insisting on vacuuming the carpet, offering to cook a meal.  Her continuing isolation is unexplained.  She becomes a ridiculous figure.

As the story’s one persisting homophobe, Kaija is simply a negative and this one-dimensionality is typical of a film where individual personalities are in short supply.  Nipa is a cliché from ancient Hollywood:  from the moment he gets up from a sofa with a slight shiver and a little cough, you know terminal illness is on the way.  Lauri Tilkanen interprets him very obviously too.  Alijoki, whose career in the diplomatic service is almost symbolic, regularly invites male friends round for ‘games of poker’ (his wife, he tells Touko, is ‘very understanding’).  Taisto Oksanen therefore has the relative dramatic advantage of playing a man inhabiting two worlds – and certainly comes over as the most sensitive actor in Tom of Finland (particularly in the early scene in which Alijoki says goodbye to Touko, expecting never to see him again, and gives him the cigarette case).  The main American characters are badly conceived and played (by actors from and/or based in northern Europe – Jakob Oftebro, Seumas F Sargent).  The whole narrative gets shaky as soon as the action moves stateside in the early 1980s.

Dome Karukoski and Alexsi Bardy show little interest in exploring, and relating to his personality, the distinctive characteristics of Tom of Finland’s idiosyncratic art.  Some of his images can be understood as illustrations of a larger post-war cultural development:  biker paraphernalia as an oppositional sub-culture, with particular attractions for gay men, thanks to its implications of risk and overt masculinity, its consequent contradiction of effeminate stereotypes.  How much, though, did the exaggerated macho and the determined humour of Tom’s work derive from the legal proscription of his sexuality and the misery that caused him?   The question becomes an insistent one – and the ignoring of it a more serious omission – thanks to Pekka Strang’s opacity in the lead role.   He doesn’t bear a close facial resemblance to the real Touko Laaksonen, according to online photographs of the latter.   More important, and although the tall, lean Strang has an engaging melancholy, it’s not easy to square his solemnity with remarks of Laaksonen’s like ‘The whole Nazi philosophy … is hateful to me, but of course I drew [Wehrmacht soldiers] anyway – they had the sexiest uniforms!’  When she first sees her brother in his leathers, Kaija laughs derisively.  She would, of course, but Pekka Strang’s physique and hangdog expression do make him look daft in the outfit; he’s more at ease in the tastefully co-ordinated clothes – beige, olive, mustard tones – that Touko usually wears in the outside world.  The effect is to make you suspect that Touko never acquired the appetite for demonstrating in public what was crucial to his underground artistic persona.   This is strikingly (even interestingly!) discordant in a piece of cinema that doesn’t only regard the expression of gay identity as A Good Thing but conceives that identity as essentially undifferentiated.  The film’s closing scene – in which Touko, back in America and in leathers, addresses a rapturous audience all turned out like Glenn Hughes of The Village People – seemed nightmarish to me because everyone looked the same.  Dome Karukoski presents it as Touko’s apotheosis.

18 August 2017