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
