By Paul Byrnes
Tom of Finland ★★★½
(R 18+) 116 minutes
Wikipedia tells us that Tom of Finland, whose real name was Touko Laaksonen, produced more than 3500 illustrations, most of which featured men with "exaggerated primary and secondary sex traits", which is a bit like saying Hugh Hefner was a publisher with an interest in photography.
Shame and desire: Lauri Tilkanen, Jessica Grabowsky and Pekka Strang in Tom of Finland.
Laaksonen drew men with slim hips, wide shoulders, rounded buttocks and tent poles between their legs. In the art of dick drawing, the man was both an artist and an optimist. Realism was not his thing. Nor was effeminacy: Tom's gay men were big, powerful guys who liked doing things with other big powerful guys, preferably in leather chaps and military uniforms. We would now call it fetish art, leather homoeroticism or just gay porn, albeit exquisitely drawn (he was a commercial artist). In the immediate post-war, when he started making these drawings at home in secret, he knew it was risky. He could be sent to jail if anyone discovered them.
In a sense, Tom of Finland is a movie about how far the gay community has come since the times of Touko Laaksonen. He was a gay man who felt shame and desire in equal measure, along with terror at the threat of exposure. His wartime experiences in the Finnish army, fighting Russians and cuddling butch German officers, gave him a taste for Nazi uniforms – if not their politics. Finland was a German ally for part of the war, fighting the Soviets. When his drawings were published in America in the 1950s, the Nazi iconography raised hackles. He was quick to disavow any sympathy with their cause: he just liked their uniforms, he said, not their racism.
That's the curious thing about the man we meet here, played by Pekka Strang. He is part innocent, part dreamer, part fearful 1940s gay man who just wants to be left alone with his paper and pencils. He lives with his sister Kaija (Jessica Grabowsky) in a spacious apartment in Helsinki. She knows nothing of his art, and wants not to know of his homosexuality. Touko has furtive encounters in public parks at night but these can turn violent if the police come with truncheons. Sex, fear, uniforms. He is haunted by the time he had to kill a Russian paratrooper who landed in front of him. He can only use his knife, because others may be landing nearby.
There's an interview on YouTube with his friend and business partner Durk Dehner, who describes this incident in some detail. In the film, Touko kills the man by stabbing him from behind. When he turns him over, he is horrified to see this young man's beautiful face. He sits quietly nearby for hours, contemplating his actions. In reality, Dehner says, he sat beside the body and howled.
I wish the director had shown us that depth of emotion. Instead, co-writer and director Dome Karukoski keeps the lid on him, to the point of opacity. Touko never gets in touch with his emotions, which may be true but is hardly dramatic. When he and his sister take in a boarder, a beautiful young dancer (Lauri Tilkanen), Touko recognises him from an encounter in the park. He says nothing while his sister pins her hopes on the man. Instead, Touko slowly seduces him, cutting his sister out of the triangle. It's ruthless, but the movie makes little of his callousness.
A wider problem is that it seems to exaggerate Tom of Finland's importance as a gay hero. You would get the impression that Tom's drawings created the gay leather movement in America from nothing. I doubt that, given the motorcycle fetishism that predated him. I accept that he was hugely influential in creating a certain kind of gay iconography, but it's also clear in the movie that American freedom of expression helped to created Tom of Finland, by allowing his drawings to be published in Physique Pictorial magazine in the first place. And when he later blames himself for the AIDS catastrophe, the movie leaps from exaggeration to gross misrepresentation and self-pity.
It's a frustrating film in that sense. There's so much interesting history here, and so little emotion in Karukoski's direction of Strang's performance. For a movie about Tom of Finland, it seems a little buttoned-up. Which is ironic.